[tekuhn]

You might recall "back in the day" these resistors were pretty common in the Help! section at your favorite auto parts store to fix your gas gauge when they went bad and would work intermittently. They fail because they have the carbon trace printed on a ceramic bar, and over time the expansion/contraction caused the printed trace to crack - usually where they met the metal ends. After they got hard to find, I used to buy a standard 1-watt resistor in the correct value and added ring terminals to the leads and put those on the gauge to fix them. It's called a shunt, because it's connected in parallel with the gauge as a bypass so that 100% of the current isn't passing through the meter movement. The good old days of analog circuits and meter movements. These days if you have what appears to be an analog gauge, there's a good chance it's really a digitally driven stepper-motor unit.