Hi Guys,

I got my guage cluster LED fix with LexTech lighting. Now all Lights work very nicely. But the tacho meter and the Speed guage dont work. It only works when I give it a hard Tap. It looks like a weak connection, I removed everything and replugged it , but it still does it.

regards,

Lawrence

 

The speedo and tach issue you are speaking about is a gremlin going around with SC owners these days. Most people on the forums here with higher mileage SC's have to tap their dash to get their speedo working whether they have done anything to their dash or not. (stock or modified) You can remove the white backplate that is held on with 4 screws and try to tighten the 6 screws in the middle around the 4 chrome boxes if you wish, those are the only connections to the motor at ALL. Good luck

 

Did you send your cluster to Lextech working and it came back not working?

 

Lextech are great, My unit was working before except the lights on the needles, But I believe its a high mileage issue. Lextech fixed alot of issues I had with the Guage cluster.

 

maybe its a damaged spring behind the needle?
that was what happened to me, nothing to do except
buy a whole new cluster.


this has been going on pretty often with SC owners haha

 

As these clusters age I notice trends with them and it used to be the backlight wouldn't fire up after the cluster was pulled. Everything worked great until you unplugged it, then the sh&t hit the fan. You could smack the dash a few times and it would all come back on or most of it depending on if the bulbs were too far gone or not. That was 5 years ago or so when it stopped because the bulbs were just getting too old to re-fire and I told everyone just replace the bulbs, they are $30 at autozone (which I listed back in 2003 in the ice blue thread part numbers and such). Then I started noticing there were gauges on the edges like water temp have recently stopped working for many and I traced that down to where the plastic inside the gauge was breaking when people screwed their clusters back together since the plastic was now at an age it would break for no real reason if you put pressure on it. Now I am starting to see the speedo and tach needles are stopping working (and this is across the board on stock clusters primarily). I've been looking at the boards and there appear to be a few capacitors that could stop working after power is disconnected or just after they "dry out".

In the audio world we have to rebuild our amplifiers every ten years because the capacitors start to dry or leak. That's the average shelf life of them. Capacitors on the cluster help feed the timer chips that regulate the information coming in from the sensors. What I need to do to determine if it is the capcitors is to collect info from people who have the dead speedo and tach issues on whether or not replacing just the motor helps (which has it's own little ecu board on it) or replacing the actual main cluster board helped. Once we have ten or 15 people who have done it we will be able to trace the problem.

I tried this with Shawn and his Titan motorsports boosted white SC3 and it ended up being one dead motor on the tach and the mobo was not controlling the speedo correctly on the other side so it's hard to say without some real data. One thing is for sure, they tach and speedo motors are dropping like fly's these days on all these cars and most of them are stock. We need to start getting info together on them and find a fix quick.

 

any updates on this?

 

Same here went in working came back not....

 

i will say that my guages have the same problem from time to time. nothing a good slap on the dash won't fix.

 

Hmm... seeing this is a few months old.... I just sent in my needle (temp) to get repaired....I seem to be having more issues after I sent in the cluster than before....(everything worked on the cluster prior to shipping it out)

I mean ZERO lights out, I just wanted some "newer" cleaner looking lights.... but not its more of a eyesore.....=\ bleh

 

Replace your 18 year old stock backlight.

Bulb filament doesnt last forever, stop expecting it to. Many people here smack their climates and clusters to light them back up rather than replace the backlight (no idea why).