Capacitive Fuel Senders

I'm almost ready to started the dreaded tank proseal marathon, but thought I'd put it off a bit longer by taking a last look at the idea of capacitive fuel senders. I have the OP07 plan which shows the Van's plates, and it looks like a nice simple and elegant solution with no moving parts (and probably lighter than the float senders), so I am quite tempted. However when I looked on the mother-ship website I couldn't find a kit so I called them. Apparently they aren't selling those parts anymore, either individually or as kits. I'm planning to email the tech guys to ask, but I'm wondering if anyone here knows why they have stopped selling them? Have there been too many problems? Does anyone have a suggestion as to the alternatives out there?
Thanks in advance.

Been very happy with my capacitive senders, tied to a Dynonavionics sky view.
Sort of a pain to calibrate at two gallon increments, but performs well. I needed to fabricate my own al backing plates. If you change fuels i.e. 100ll to motor fuel they need re-cal. Got mine from ACS

Capacitive sender

You can make them. I may have a drawing of the plate dimensions if you need. Everything is off the shelf. Two plates, some delrin spacers, screws, nutplates, BNCs and wire.

Surprised they don't sell the sub-kits anymore, but yes they are easy to fabricate. The exact shape of the plate is not absolutely critical, you're just making a capacitor plate, or a pair of them. Since it will be calibrated anyway they don't have to be exact.

I haven't seen what a capacitive setup looks like, but I am going to be removing my tanks this year to fix fuel weeping problems on the inboard baffles... The covers that were put in when the anti-rotation service bulletin was done weren't sealed well enough and have always weeped a little bit. If there was a way to upgrade to Capacitive senders while I have the tanks open, i'd consider it... Is it possible?

Senders

Snowflake said:

I haven't seen what a capacitive setup looks like, but I am going to be removing my tanks this year to fix fuel weeping problems on the inboard baffles... The covers that were put in when the anti-rotation service bulletin was done weren't sealed well enough and have always weeped a little bit. If there was a way to upgrade to Capacitive senders while I have the tanks open, i'd consider it... Is it possible?

Click to expand...

Probably not Vans but Princeton makes one thhat mounts in the inboard rib.

Also, in any case they have to be trimmed in order to have the proper clearance to stiffeners etc.

Of course I just had to make my own delrin spacers:
http://www.mykitlog.com/users/displ...project=2288&category=9329&log=206547&row=129

If you have access to a lathe, delrin is easy to work with.

If you want to use the delrin that normally comes with the kit, I might even have them laying around....

I would want to make sure the flop tube did not strike the plates or the Princeton probe.

AltonD said:

I would want to make sure the flop tube did not strike the plates or the Princeton probe.

Click to expand...

In my recollection the inboard capacitive plate was in the 2nd bay (one over from the flop tube), hence shielded by the 2nd rib.

They aren't that complicated in concept, but they still took awhile to get installed properly.

Reply from Vans

I received the following reply to my query from Vans:

'The cap. senders required expensive converters and only worked with some gauges/EFIS units. They weren?t fixable if anything went wrong after installation, generated too many questions, and we didn?t sell many; so they finally fell into the ?More trouble than they?re worth? category.'

I think I'll go with the float senders - even though it seems like there shouldn't be many failure modes with cap. senders, at least with the floats a replacement is possible without too much upheaval.