There is a ton of information on this for the ES series on other forums, but none too much on our LS400's.

I am wondering what type of lighting the needle on ours uses, Lamp, LED, CCFL? I would guess the latter as with mine the needle was out when the car started, and fiddling with the brightness eventually got it to flicker to life. Now no amount of fiddling fixes it. Anybody know of fixes other than painting it with fluorescent paint and putting a black light on the dash?

Repair services I have seen are only for the SC400 and ES300, but nothing for the LS... Anyone ever fix theirs before?

I am guessing the usual, check connections, power supply, etc. But all the other needles and indicators work fine...

 

The needles are cold cathode. There is a conductive coating on the back of the needles which tends to crack over time. This breaks the circuit and causes part of the needle to go dark.

The repair places that do the instrument panel black out problems also do the needle repairs.

This has been discussed as part of the instrument panel lighting problems. Check the stickies at the top.

 

Yeah - when I first bought my old 1990 LS400, it had 220K miles and all of the dash lights and needles worked perfectly, which amazed me. The PO, which was the original owner said that he had never had any problems with them. Well, as my wonderful luck would have it, about 8 months later, I accidentally hit a pothole on the highway leading to the freeway entry ramps. As soon as I hit that hole, my speedometer needle went out at the end! I am assuming it may have been nearing the end of its life and that hard jolt finished it off. That was one of the reasons I sold the car, because I did not want to deal with having the cluster removed and shipped off for repairs. It would have not been as bad had it been the fuel gauge, temperature gauge, or even the tach needle- I could have lived with that, but it had to be the speedometer.

I was beside of an early LS400 the other day and I noticed that the temperature needle was about out completely.

These needles seem to go out with age, rather than mileage/usage. I was looking at a local 1991 LS400 a month ago at a local dealership... it only had 68K actual miles, LIKE NEW, but it already had the speedometer needle partly blackened out! Unacceptable for a car that they were asking $10K for!

Luckily, my current 91' LS400 has all of the needles and backlighting working fine for now, but I know its probably a matter of time before something goes awry. I hope not though. I am hoping that it had a problem before and the PO of it already had it repaired.

I am wondering, if someone is having a needle light problem and did have it sent off for repairs, would it be common practice for that guy that works on them to also go ahead and repair the other needles that are still working, since it would only be a matter of time before they went on the fritz?

 

I sent my instrument cluster to Jim Walker in late 1994 for him to repair the non-illumination problem. At that time, the speedometer needle was dark at the tip. In addition to replacing the capacitors that cause the cluster illumination problems, he also resurfaced the back of the speedometer and odometer needles. He told me that these were the only needles in my cluster that appeared to be going out.

The cost to fix the needles was not much since he had the cluster disassembled to fix the capacitor problem. I believe it was $25.00 per needle.