taylortec

Hello everybody,

So I have been having this ghost issue with my 5 spd cluster from the day I got the car. I had no back lights, no needle lights, speed is off by about 10mph and no tach but I did have fuel and Temp thankfully.

A little history on the car, its a 96 that the previous owner got from GT Spec, then he did a JDM gte swap with a V160 with matching diff and Aem V2 built at M&S performance by Mike.

Now that that's out of the way, I will get back into the problem. No lights. I fixed the tach issue by jumping the resistor, easy peasy. The lights. I got out the old schematic and started checking things. All checked out okay going into the cluster from the A,B,C plugs. "Head Shake"
I pulled the cluster apart, checked the bulbs, THEY ARE ALL BLOWN! I thought okay, no problem, I'll swap them for some other ones to see if that works. NOPE! Hmmm what to do. Hot wire time.
I found that each half of the cluster back lights is powered separately on plastic board plug "C". I soldered on a some leads to back feed the circuit, jumped it across to the other side and test fired it on the bench. Bingo! I got lights - go figure.

Now the needles. 12v is to much, so I went to radio shack and picked up a 5v regulator and a couple capacitors, T tapped that into the cluster light circuit and fallowed that by soldering the 5v out onto the clips for the tack and speed, then under the screw terminals for the fuel and temp (Temp is not working, I blew that needle with 12v way back when I didn't read it wasn't supped to have 12v

So put everything together and bench tested one more time to make sure it still worked. NOPE.... I had to disconnect the "C" plastic circuit band from the board to make it work.

Installed into the car and went to test, Battery dead I put a jump pack on it to test it out. IT WORKS! Tach as well, I was worried it wouldn't. Maybe this will help someone.


PS: The ODO and Time doesn't work, It would come on for about 10 seconds after I disconnect the cluster for awhile. I checked all the caps on the cluster, all were good. Nothing on the cluster board looks bad witch is why I took this approach.



So this is my band-aid till I find a deal on a Cluster.

taylortec

So a little update for all, I hooked everything up to the car and got it going, I must have been missing a ground previously because needles all burned out. I'm guessing my 5v I had going to the needles got another voltage along with the car at the same time and poof, no more needles. My hotwire is currently not hooked up, just my ground. I'm going to pull the cluster and check for voltage across the needles to see if I have any voltage tonight. If I do, I'm going to replace them with tested working ones and I will be designing my own fix. I'll update you guys again when I get my needles replaced and have tested a couple ways to get them back up for cheap. I'm thinking we are going to sell them with a core charge once we get them produced, that way we keep recycling our needles and there is no down time for the people needing the needles. We are also designing a color changing needle, that changes as rpm/speed changes. I think its going to be really cool and if is successful we might branch to other vehicles. This would require sending me your whole cluster.