Benchtest Volt meter: bad luck?

[jumpsoffrock]

I have two Voltmeters from a couple squarbodies in the junkyard, and I'm trying to bench test them.
I have read about a dozen threads regarding the matter and from what I can tell the ceramic resistors on BOTH are bad.
A couple threads addressed these gauges in detail and considered a ceramic resistor failure to be uncommon.
Both gauges are behaving the exact same way with every test. Because of this, and the alleged rarity of resistor failures, I feel like somehow I'm doing something wrong.


What I did:
I marked the three posts A(positive 12V), B (factory cluster ground), C(unused in factory vehicles;irrelevant)

Initially I hastily hooked a couple jumper wires and put 12v to post A and touched post B to a tested ground. Nothin.

I read a bunch of stuff; got a OHM meter and tested resistance between posts A-and-C, and for fun A-and-B, I was looking for ~127 ohms.
Nothin. there was no circuit, no resistance.


So now I got an old school 9V battery and wired it into an old Stewart Warner Voltmeter, and the needle showed 11 for some reason. Whatever.

Plugged 9V into both square body voltmeters(+ to A; - to B). Nothin.


Now I started finicking and had some "fun".
I hooked the 9v battery positive to the C post and left the negative on post B

Gauge doesn't necessarily peg, but it quickly shoots to about 18V. Both gauges do the exact same thing.


Am I somehow managing to screw up a simple test? Or do you think that this so-called "uncommon" event of resistor failure happened to both gauges?

Any help is appreciated.