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Driving down the road like thousands before until you smell that unmistakable smell of burning insulation!! Then the instrument cluster goes crazy then smoke is coming from behind the dash. Of course the dash!! Because you can't get to a fire there!!
Fortunately as I was ripping my dash apart with my hands to get to the fire, a cop with a fire extinguisher was able to put it out. Let me tell you, the only thing worse than burning your fingers is getting that extinguisher powder in the burns!! I believe the primary ingredient is powdered hydrcloric acid! OUCH!!!!
I've been able to replace the burned parts and wiring harnesses {the one behind the dash is 9 feet long with 25 plugs} but I have two questions.
I pulled another cluster from a pick a part place along with all the other parts, but none of the needles I have, and I had a bunch on hand, work. I want to make sure that it's not the cluster before I buy replacements. How do you test the needles? I've looked in the past posts and I couldn't find it mentioned. Second, I know this is a long shot but I want to transfer the mileage over to the other cluster I pulled, would anyone know which of the chips on the board store the mileage info or does anyone know where I could look up the info?
Thanx
Man that sucks, did you find the root cause of the fire? Not sure how to check the power to the needles, they are very fragile.
As mentioned above member O.L.T is very knowledgeable about the clusters and such. You can also contact Tanin electronics, he is a vendor here on CL who specialize in cluster rebuilds.
Good luck restoring your car back.
Well I'm assuming that after I replaced all the wiring in the dash including the cluster that I managed to throw out the root problem. But we all know what happens when you assume! I was hoping that I could just hook up a battery or two to each needle to see if it's working or not.
On my home computer I also included a picture, it's not coming up on this computer, do you see a pic in this thread?
Glad that you got it put out before it took the whole car with, and glad that you weren't more seriously hurt.
I was just thinking about how challenging it's going to be working on older cars in 10-20 years with the number of electronics nowadays. Now we deal with bad ECU caps and such but I'm afraid that such things will only become more common as the electronics age and the number of modules in the newer cars is staggering.
03-15-18, 12:08 PM
Fire fire fire!!
