Years ago we wanted a fuel dipstick for our Cherokee 140. One thing we
quickly found out is that dip indications are very sensitive to the angle of
the dipstick. Tilt it a bit and reading can be off by a few gallons,
especially when below half full.
What we ended up using was an old-fashioned wooden paint stirring stick of
the sort that paint stores used to give away. I haven't seen one in years,
but you could easily fashion an equivalent from a 1" wide, 1/8" thick wooden
slat. Make sure it's long enough so that it can't accidentally slip
completely into the tank. We primed and painted the wood a solid background
color. We then drained one tank completely. (We did this after a long
flight, when there were only a few gallons in that tank. We then added
fuel, 5 gallons at a time. After each addition we dipped out wooden stick
into the tank to find the indicated level, which we marked for the
appropriate fuel quantity. Here's the trick: to get repeatable readings,
use the tab in the tank and the inside edge of the filler neck as "rests"
for the stick so that its orientation in the tank is consistent. Finally,
we painted our quantity marks on the stick in a contrasting color. We found
that the dipstick was both accurate and repeatable, and that we could easily
interpolate between the 5 gallon markings to get readings accurate to within
one gallon.
--
-Elliott Drucker
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