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voltage meter

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tahoe healey

tahoe healey

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I purchased a Smiths voltage meter at the Dixon British car flea market. It is the exact size of the other smaller gauges and has the black face. How can I tell if it works? It was fairly clean but I cannot get it to work with flashlight batteries. If its bad, can it be repaired somewhere? or is it not worth it?
 
TH, if it's a voltmeter, and not an ammeter, just hook it to the battery in the Healey, and see if it works. I doubt that flashlight batteries have sufficient amperage to move the needle.
Mr. Russell surely will know.
Jeff
 
T.H., I agree with Bugeye, if it is really a voltmeter, hook it up across the battery of your Healey and the needle should at least jump towards the correct reading... If it doesn't move when you hook it up to the car battery, disconnect the car battery and then put an ohm meter across the terminals to see if there is an open circut. If you get some kind of reading with an ohm meter, ( other than infinite resistance ), then the meter movement is probably frozen. Disassemble it and try to free it up. You have nothing to loose trying to fix it if it is not working now. Refer to Doug Lawson's tech tip about fixing tachs. The face of the voltmeter probably comes off the same way. If it was an open circut, you may be able to find or see where the open circut is.
 
The meter is likely to be about 15 - 18 volts full scale. One 1.5 volt flashlight battery would only move the needle A tenth of the scale or less. Two batteries in series would only move it a little further. Possibly not enough to readily see. Jeff & Ed have good suggestions. I DO hope you are not planning to cut another hole in the dash!
D
 
Good suggestion with the car battery. I'm not sure which terminal is which. They don't appear to be marked. I have opened it and it looks quite simple with a simple winding of very fine wire. I assume the wire heats the metal and it moves like a thermal couple to bent the metal and move the needle via a lever system.
Nope, no new holes but I was planning to put it in the spot where the radio speaker goes (BJ8) along with a clock if I can find one with a black face.
 
HI TH, just hook it up "momentarily" one way and see if it reads,If it doesn't reverse the leads and see if it reads.If it doesn't read put it in the bin /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif.Just kidding send it to Nisongner for a rebuild.--Keoke
 
As others have said, connect your volt meter to your car battery with short little test leads. The Smiths volt meters I'm familiar with work with bimetallic heating (just like the fuel gauges on cars with the voltage stabilizer) so they aren't polarity sensitive. Be advised if that if you were installing an aftermarket gauge from someone like VDO or AutoMeter, polarity is important.
 
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