Gauges

[BlakeWood]

I recently installed some reverse indiglo gauges in my '95 Del Sol S. I spliced and soddered them to the aux. lights. The gauges light up perfectly, and the gas gauges and engine temperature work fine; however, the tach is sticky and won't go smoothly, and the speedometer has gone crazy. The speedometer won't read correctly. For some reason it always shows that I'm going faster than I actually am. Any help y'all could provide would be greatly appreciated.

[AudioGuy93DelSol]

Possibly the face is rubbing against the tach needle. As for the speedometer, do you mean it's jumping around? If it's just reading fast it's probably becuase the gauge faces are miscalibrated. Where did you get them from?

[BlakeWood]

Originally Posted by AudioGuy93DelSol

Possibly the face is rubbing against the tach needle. As for the speedometer, do you mean it's jumping around? If it's just reading fast it's probably becuase the gauge faces are miscalibrated. Where did you get them from?

I made sure that the needles weren't rubbing the faces and that the rods that the needles were on weren't bent. How could the gauge face be miscalibrated? I'm sure that's not the case though. I got them from D1 Zone.

[AudioGuy93DelSol]

By miscalibrated I meant that they screwed up printing the numbers on the face. Did you play around with the needles while you had the cover off? I've heard that can damage them and that's the only thing I can think of that would cause these problems.

[BlakeWood]

I doubt that they misprinted the numbers on the gauge face because the numbering looks just like the old gauges. As for the needles, all I did was pop them off, put on the new faces, then pop them back on. I tried not to mess with any of that stuff too much because I'm not 100% sure how it all works.

And here's another boggling thing. The tach isn't sticky when I have the clear plastic front off of the gauge box. It didn't make any sense to me, so I looked to see if the plastic face was rubbing the needle, and it wasn't. I looked to see if the plastic front, in any way, affected anything with the tach, and it didn't. I just don't understand why the stupid things won't work now.

[AudioGuy93DelSol]

Maybe check the wiring harness behind the guage cluster. Make sure those 2 big plugs are in tight. That's the only other thing I can think of.

[BlakeWood]

Everything's plugged in nice and snug. Do you know if there's a way to like reset the gauges (not odometer), like a recalibration for the needles type of thing.

[AudioGuy93DelSol]

No, noting that I know of. And all these problems started right after you put the faces on? You haven't dont anything to the ECU correct?

[BlakeWood]

Here is exactly what I did:

removed the gauge box from the dash by unplugging and unscrewing everything

removed the old gauge faces

put on the new gauge faces

soddered the new gauges to the auxillery lights switch

put everything back together

[AudioGuy93DelSol]

I took a working dizzy off once and put it back on the next day and it didn't work anymore. Random breakage I guess. I really can't think of anything else other than the cluster itsself is messed up.

[BlakeWood]

Do you think if I brought it to a mechanic that maybe they could find and fix whatever's wrong? It's pretty annoying to have malfunctioning gauges, and it's going to suck when I'm going 60 but think it's 45 and get a ticket.

[AudioGuy93DelSol]

You'd probably have to replace the cluster. I doubt your local mechanic would be able to fix it. Maybe you could take it apart and see if you can find anything that looks wrong. It's worth a shot. If all else fails, passwordjdm.com has del Sol SiR clusters on sale.

[94SolGrl]

I'll go ahead and shoot this thing in the forehead to put it out of its misery.

When you popped the needles off you decalibrated them. Had you played with them a bit you would have noticed that they are spring loaded. If you manually move the speedometer up, it goes back to 0. When you popped the speedo needle off, the post that it mounts to was allowed to spin all the way down (ever wonder why there's that little perch for the speedo needle to sit on? It keeps it from rolling all the way down). With the speedometer needle decalibrated, your ECU is confused. The motor's speed sensor is sending it one bit of info, the gauge is sending it another. Consequently, it doesn't know what to tell the tach. You also probably bent the tach post when you popped the needle off. The entire gauge cluster mechanism is mechanical. One thing's off, it's all off. It's also very delicate.

The bad news:

Your cluster is f'd, and very few shops will work on them. Usually only honda dealerships will, and they report it to carfax as an odometer discrepancy. To avoid that, go junkin/ebaying and try to find a new cluster with close to the same miles.

The good news:

del Sol S model clusters are cheap.

And the SiR cluster will NOT work. You have an S model. The positions for the needles will be off. It will say you are at 3500 when you're actually at about 2500 (rpm) because the SiR cluster has more numbers on it. Get another S model cluster and get gauges that don't require removal of needles. (usually the hole in the middle of the gauge is big enough to slide it over the needles).

And they all lived happily ever after. The end.