Thursday, January 8, 2015

Chicks dig a guy with blink.

One of the fancy futuristic enhancements to the '94 B-body was it's digital dash.  No longer would we have to be slaves to a needle that told us about how fast we were going, now we would know the exact answer when the officer asks "Do you know how fast you were going?"  'Course like many "new" technologies, it's not without it's drawbacks.  In this case, the digital display starts going wonky.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes just the odometer lights up or the speedo stays lit and odo goes out.  Any and every combination of not working can be seen, and it often blinks on and off going down the road.  For most people, the fix is relatively simple.  The digital display contacts the gauge cluster assembly through a bunch of tiny spring loaded fingers.  Over time, the fingers wear dents into the solder of the contact points on the back of the display board, and the connection becomes dodgy.  I'm not going to go through taking the thing apart, because step by step instructions can be found elsewhere on the internet.  You can see here the divots in the row of solder tabs along the bottom of the board.
The fix is pretty simple.  You just carefully touch each pad with a soldering iron, and the solder reflows into a smooth surface.  The only thing to watch out for is you don't want to accidently flow two pads together.  Here, the pads on the right side of the row have been resoldered.
With the pads resoldered, the fingers on the cluster get a gently scotch-briting to clean off any oxidation.  Sometimes it's necessary to very gently(very!) pull the fingers out a bit so they put more pressure on the contacts.  With that done and everything back together, my speedo lights up like it should.  There are some cars that this won't fix(my Caprice was one of them, I could never get it to work right), but for a majority of them, it does the trick.


No comments:

Post a Comment