For starters, I checked www.batee.com, a very good site by the way, and also fixed a bad internal ground on the circuit board on my 84 in the past, so I have some knowledge of the instrument clusters for these cars.

That being said, my buddy is having a problem with the cluster in his 88. He had to charge the battery a few days ago after it was sitting for a while. It started and ran fine and has proper voltage when not running and while running. However none of his guages or backlighting is working. The bright headlight and turn signal indicators work fine, but his guages are all messed up. On his fuel guage some of the bars are lit up, but random ones, not in order or any pattern. The numbers for the readouts like temp, volts, tach, and speedo are jumbled up like parts of the numbers are showing, but random parts and nothing being readable. Also the Tach and speedo bars again like the fuel guage are randomly lit up. Now again the back lighting is not working but if we had a light shining on the cluster we could see this.

I pulled the fuse marked guages and the cluster went out and nothing was showing. Put the fuse back in and it was back the the digital randomness.

Wanted to check if anyone can say what could be causing this. Is the cluster itself bad, or could this be a ECM problem or something? The wiring on the car is original and unmolested down to the stock radio. The rest of the car seems to be working fine. The car has 90K on it.

Any thoughts?

Thanks

 

No one?

I would hate to send the cluster out if it is not the cluster...

 

If he was using a quick charger, then that could do it. They tend to cause problems for cars electronics, if the bat. cables are left on.

 

I think the battery was hooked up,but I was not there to say for sure.

Is it possible that he jolted the dash and damaged it?

I was going to pull that dash apart and do a full check on everything that is listed on www.batee.com just to make sure, but Im not sure its going to fix it.

I dont see any burning or discoloration except around the illumination bulbs, and that is fairly minor(compared to mine).

 

Hey ffvetteman, as for the guage backlighting being dark but the turn signal lights working, it could be due to a bad ground.

There's a Corvette magazine article by Gordon Killebrew, a Corvette guru, on how to fix this: http://www.corvettemagazine.com/1999...ash/dashp4.asp

I used his exact directions to fix the backlighting on my dash a few days ago, and it worked.

As for the funky numbers showing up on the guages, my guess is that it could be due to faulty or loose wiring in the 32 or 24 pin connectors that hook up to the dash, or it could just be that they're dirty. There's info in the article I linked above on how to clean the connectors inside the dash. Apparently they can develop corrosion.

Hope this helps a bit.

 

Thanks for the post.

I know the problem you are talking about, I had that on my 84. I fixed the internal grounds etc and it worked fine.

In the 88, his turn signals are not lit up, the back lights are out, and when the dash is plugged in, if you look at it with a flashlight, you can see some of the lights are lit up, but in a random pattern. It is not just a backlight/ground issue.

When he called me, thats what I thought it was. He had the cluster out already and I looked inside and it all looked good. I checked the connectors and they were clean as can be, all the pins were shiny. I was hoping it was something like that, but I am thinking it is not.