'93 SSEi Gauge Cluster Problems

[LloydCFerguson]

When I'm driving my Bonneville, all of a sudden all the gauges and displays (DIC an Compass), except the Speedometer and Tach, will pin then drop back to zero and sometimes resume normal operation for a while and other times stop functioning at some random reading. Sometimes the Trip Odometer will reset to zero, sometimes it will retain its reading. They will repeat this a few times, a couple ofminutes apart and will eventually end with the DIC dark and the gauges frozen. Shutting the car off and restarting it will fix it for a short time but eventually it will die again. I notice while it is dead the odometer does not accumulate mileage. I'm guessing that it is some sort of intermittant connection in the cluster or maybe the circuit which resets the cluster on power-up is going flaky (maybe a bad capacitor?).

I've phoned a couple of places I found on the internet and they all claim to know how to fix it if I'll send them the cluster, I'd rather fix it myself if I could to avoid the hassle of being without the car. Does anybody know what the magic fix is to this or where to look?

Thanks in advance.

[MattStrike]

IIRC some people have had success just cleaning the connectors and re-installing. That didn't work for me.
I had to remove the cluser, resolder all the pins on the connector on the cluster PCB, and then the tricky part is to remove the pins on the wire harness and re-spring them one at a time, unless they are oxydizing in which case you'll want to splice in a new (junkyard) replacement pin. It's a lot of pins, don't get them mixed up, do one at a time and make sure it goes back in the right spot. Then you'll need to use a contact cleaner and reinstall.

[LloydCFerguson]

Thanks, just wondering, did you try just resoldering the cluster (fairly easy) without re-forming the pins in the harness connector (considerably more difficult)?

[MattStrike]

I did not. But I found problems on both sides of both connectors. You can usually look down into the female pin on the harness and tell if the spring tab needs to be reformed (if it doesn't contact the roof of the pin then it needs to be), it may only need to have one or two on the harness side fixed, that way you're not pulling them all apart.