I searched through the first 20 pages of cluster problems and it didn't help at all. Everyone seems to be having dancing gauges or just bad gauges where mine just doesn't work, but still lights up and the warning lights still work.
So here is the background.
A few days after I installed my coilovers, my cluster would flicker a couple times at random. The needles would just die but then everything would start to work shortly after. It happened so random and quick that the first few times this happened, I thought I was just imagining it. I first thought that because I'm stupid low, I was rubbing through a harness, which is what i'm used to being a 240 fanboy. Turns out BMW is the coolest in the world and didn't run any wires near the front tires. After that, I went and replaced every single fuse in the box. Blown or not. All that did was make all my interior lights brighter.
Eventually, the needles just stopped working. After a couple days of google, I determined that my cluster was just bad, so I picked up a new one and everything worked......for a couple days. This time, it didn't flicker at all. It just died, and when it happened, you could smell something fry. My friend even got in the car shortly after and asked "what board did you fry?". So I knew that somewhere, I had bad wires.
So now I am at the point of building a custom cluster because I just tore apart my dash and checked out every single wire I could follow to see if anything was burnt, torn, old looking, brittle, etc etc......I couldn't find anything.
So here are my questions:
1) Anyone have any ideas? I've checked each power, ground, and signal wire. I printed out the diagram and color highlighted each wire I needed to look at. Hopefully there is something I missed or someone had this problem and we can become new best friends.
2) I go the custom cluster route, which I think would be easier to me, except I can't seem to find sufficient information about how to correctly wire up a tach, speed, and fuel level gauge.
I know the fuel sensor reads 10ohms empty - 250ohms full, but with it having to sensors for each side of the tank, will this complicate the process? The diagram shows the fuel gauge has three wires total. one to connect each sensor, and two coming back to the cluster, although one wire ties into another sensor wire. So I'm thinking that the solo wire is the signal and the other wire is a ground.
With the tach, I assume I need a converter box of some kind because of the coil on plugs, but I haven't found anything useful to back up my theory.
And with speed, I've never installed a speedometer before, but I do know that for where I drive, accuracy is key. If I can't find a speedo that wires in to the stock speed sensor and reads correctly, I'll have to dish out and get a really nice gps speedo, which I'm afraid to even look up the prices on.
So sorry for the long read and amazing props to anyone who reads it all, but I find it easier to get great suggestions when the entire story is known.
Topic: Gauge cluster question (Read 3106 times)