azakd

Ok, just like everyone else my gauges in my 92 sc 400 where starting to flicker and not work so well. I sent them in to Lextech Lighting and got them redone with the ultra 32 backlight and the white needles. I installed them, and the needles were still flickering and not working 100%. I contacted Lextech and they said to push gently on the base of the needles themselves. This solved the problem for about 30 min. Thet still continued to flicker and not work 100%. Lextech said to re check all the wiring harnesses and make sure theres no lose wires. I did that and even pushed on the base of the needles again. Now the needles dont even light up, I dont know if I pushed to hard or what, but this is really starting to irratate me. I really like the work performed on my gauge cluster, and I dont want to give Lextech a bad name, but this really does suck. I dont want to have to bite the bullet and go to the dealer. So could anyone try and shed some light on the subject?

L. L. S.

Azakd, Don't worry about a bad name. We are here to help and that's well known.

The problem with your unit is one that is so rare, out of hundreds of clusters i have never seen it happen. Normally needles die off and we rebuild them with our special waterfall design or SMD design. You, for instance, have the white waterfalls. By replacing them, we correct the problem of the damaged needles and everyone is happy. Well, in your case, you have the only bad circut board we have ever seen in the years we have been doing this.

Here's the circut board: http://lextech.org/gallery/albums/us...rmal_board.jpg

and here is the problem with the needles: http://lextech.org/gallery/albums/us...heatdamage.jpg

Something on your board is going out, first time for everything i suppose. What we can see from the movie you took is that the needles all light up with no problem.

http://www.lextech.org/images/pics/badboardcluster.MOV
(quicktime movie file)

All the needles seem to cut completely off with no warning whatsoever. You stated that it happens when you turn the turn signals on, and other electrical items in your car. This sounds to me like a bad ground either in the dimmer circut or the cluster. Now, since you didn't mention whether or not the climate and radio also dim, we'll assume the speedometer and eliminate the dimmer circut for now. So either the circut board tracers which are 13 years old have developed a bad ground on one of them, or there are cluster components going out. Likely, something is bad in the power supply.

So as you can see, once the needles are replaced, we have corrected the problem and done our job. You have a very unusual problem with your cluster and the circut board making ALL the needles cut completely off, this is not a problem with the "flickering" needle that everyone else is used to. The other guy's needles just flicker inside the needle from the damage you see in the pic i supplied above. When all the needles cut off at once, there is a power problem to the new needles you have, which is not something we have any control over. Taking the unit out of the car and moving it around while you were trying to press the needles and such probably just jarred up the bad component enough to get it working for a little bit. This makes me think it could be a capacitor.

When all the needles cut off, power to the board is being cut. This points out that the needles fire correctly, but the board seems to have a bad component on it. Nothing we repair or have ever had to, so don't worry about having traveled here to form a thread, it's quite alright. We did our job and at least when the needles ARE lit, they look great in that movie.

Now, i have told you through e-mail to send your unit over to us so we can look at the board for you. I did say i'd be happy to do it for you. There is no charge at all, just trying to help. We can't beg you however. With us having done our job, and even offering to help you free of charge on your board problem.... i'm really not sure why this thread is here. We'd still like to help you with this odd problem however, and have asked you not to give up on that unit just yet and see if we can find what is wrong on the board. It isn't going to cost you anything, and we'd be delighted to help, even if we don't normally have to do anything like that. Hopefully our research would help someone in the future if we ever run into a bad board again.

L. L. S.

Update, recieved John's cluster today. Problem below:





Hard to say why John's cluster decided to do this, as it was a problem that has obviously haunted him for a long time now making him turn to us for help. I'm happy to say that after The board PC mount resistors were replaced, it fired up and made the test run in style (they are really diodes, but not used this way in this application. They are used for voltage control).

Now you don't have to go to the stealer John No charge of course, that's what we are here for Enjoy We got to get some insight on a problem that may arise in the future with some other cluster. (never in 500 clusters, but hey, ya never know!)


First pic: leaving for test drive. Last pic 3 miles later returning.

L. L. S.

By the way, here is a pic of one of your old needles. Completely toasted

aliga

iTrader: (147)

thats customer service for ya

L. L. S.

Yes sir

Those pics are actually very cool because you can see in the first pics the car is ice cold and the high idle cam is on. When it returned at full temp the high idle cam was off.