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Well; time for a Jim post! A Z girl named Melissa Barone brought her '90TT over today. She wanted me to install her new Indiglo guages. WELL.. I didn't feel super confident about that, especially after reading a lot of the old posts where almost everybody had broken something. I didn't want to do it, but she persisted in asking me, and finally I said "Okay, but I can't promise I won't break anything." 
So this is of course the stock cluster; the engine was on so I could use this pic for a reference re: the needles. Pulled out the cluster
and opened it up. Took me like, 5 minutes to figure out in addition to the little snaps all around there are 2 screws holding the thing closed. lol
Anyway... then I used a little shrimp fork to take off the needles. The guage replacement was very straightforward and simple, or so I thought. Put the needles back on; did a temporary reinstall so I could drive the car around the block & test everything.
The temp. and fuel guages worked right away. The tach needed to be messed with just a little bit, and then it worked fine too. The speedometer, however, lagged. BAD. Like, it showed how fast you were going 10 seconds ago. Weird. Pulled it apart, fiddled with it. Same deal. Read some posts in Search. Did what they said. Weird. Still with the lag. I was pissed. Meanwhile I had broken off the little post stopping the coolant needle during the swap, so I JB Weld-ed a little screw in place of the post; tiny screw, nobody would notice unless they were looking. While I was waiting for the glue to dry, I read more posts. The OLDEST post, finally, that had to do with white face guages, dated 1997 said something interesting. "DO NOT pull out the needle & post together. You MUST leave the post in place and only remove the needle, or else your guage will lag or stick." Hmm... no other post I could find held this valuable information, which I thought was strange. I drew up what is being said there:
See, the little electric thing that moves the needle has a post sticking out of it that goes to the needle. IF you remove the post from the motor thingie then you will break the motor. Wish I'd known that earlier. You must remove the needle while the post is in place. Easier said than done though, because the post is very tight in the needle but comes out of the motor thingie relatively easily. Therefore you must CUT OUT the old guage face and use pliers to hold the post in place while pulling off the needle. NOT EASY lemme tell ya. But that's what you gotta do if you want it to work right. So I had to tell Melissa that she either had to deal with a laggy speedometer or get another one for like, $150. She decided to stay with the laggy one for now. Anyway... at first I didn't like the white face guages; but they're growing DBD::ODBC::db prepare failed: (DBD: st_prepare/SQLAllocStmt err=-2) at incl_db.pm line 314.
on me. Especially the Indiglo part. 8-) Dig it:
 Hope you enjoyed that little post!
Yo' Friends,
  '92TT Stage III½ (RC 555s)
Hi-Flow intake; 3" B&B cat-back w/dual 4.5" tips; JWT ECU;
ICQ 8524599
Jim's Database of Z32 turbocharger upgrades |
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Indiglo guage install (pix) - 
