gauges acting funny after swapping faces, need some ideas
 

i replaced the black gauge faces with a set of silver ones i got from woody and now i ran into a minor inconvenience. note i just replaced the "faces" not the entire assembly, basically taking it out, removing the needles, putting the silver faces and putting the needles and everything else back together.

i used Randall's guide which was very helpful! :cheers:
How to Swap your gauge faces

after i had everything back in i did my best to set the needles to the correct position and after a lot of fuss i got them to indicate correctly BUT now every time i turn the key in i have the fuel needle bouncing downwards for a few seconds like it's trying to find it's lowest position then finally bounces to show the correct level.

if you look closely at the video you'll see what i mean:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnY1KkoYme8

while it's doing that, even if i turn the car on no needles move (like the one for revs) until the fuel one does its "thing". once that phase is done everything bounces back and works.

any idea what's going on? do i need to reset something? i disconnected the battery a few times but didnt help. did i break something when moving them around?
one thing i did mess up is i didnt disconnect the battery so when i hooked the gauge cluster back on for the first time ALL needles went wacky like this one but i was able to sort them out by putting them in the right position.


other than this the gauges work fine.

thanks,

Cristian

Reseat the plugs on the back is my only input.

when you say plugs you mean disconnect the 3 main plugs in the back of the gauge assembly?
wouldn't disconnecting the battery do the same?

Yes I mean those 3 plugs. Disconnecting the battery won't help if they are not seated properly. I would pull them out and reattach them. They can be hard to get in there perfectly.

Gauges
 

Almost all modern instrument clusters are either stepper motors or servos in reality. It sounds like you got it off a spline or two. The gauge is trying to find "home" position but is being held back by the needle. You might consider sending this to a cluster repair specialist at this point...you could damage it more if you are not very careful.

Best of luck with this

Dwight

just giving a quick update on this one. i noticed the gauges got a bit better every time so i decided to roll with it for a while and it seems after trying to find the home position a few good times they sorted themselves out :)
when i turn the key in they pop into the correct position indicating temp and fuel right away.

you gotta love issues that fix themselves :D

cheers,

Cristian

If your shopping on Amazon sometime< pick up a small can of Deoxit. As these cars age corrosion can set in.

just to conclude this thread, although not much can be learned from it:

sometimes you have to learn that some problems fix themselves. like this one.. eventually the gauges started working normally without me doing anything. probably that delayed self-fix german engineering