My husband recently replaced the battery. When he did it “arced” and must have made the dashboard gauges “jump”. The fuel gauge is now below the pin that usually stops the gauge from going below zero. Now the fuel gauge is always “zero”. Any idea how to fix this without taking the dashboard apart?
You don’t say what year car, but you most likely have a blown fuse. The fuse box is likely on the driver’s side, under the hood or under the dash. But I doubt , no I know, the fuel gauge does not rate its own fuse, so what if anything is not working? If nothing else is broken and the fuses are all good, your “arching” theory is just incidental and false.
Actually the more I think about it, you might have a bad sending unit. This is often accessed above the fuel tank via some sort of panel in or near the trunk. In some cases the sending unit might be internal, inside the gas tank.
Absolutely can happen I’ve seen it before. I recently answered a similar post try searching here for it. You can often use a magnet to drag the needle back around to the proper position.
We ended up fixing by drilling a very small hole in the upper part of the plastic and using a thin wire to move the fuel needle counter clock wise to the correct side of the pin. Seems to work fine now. We tried the magnet but couldn’t find one strong enough to move the needle.
Thanks for the suggestion but we couldn’t find a magnet strong enough.
Put some acrylic adhesive in the hole to keep dust out.