So…. Things escalated somewhat. Following the manual climate control retrofit I had the cluster bezel removed in order to get the illumination source power showed earlier this week… well I also had the intent to swap the SC fuel/ Boost/Vacuum gauge and bezel back to the regular volts type now that the idle tuning is mostly dialed in(and having a boost gauge in a NA car makes me wince), but in the process with the cluster apart my ambition kicked in on a back of the mind project…
As shown earlier in this very thread I installed a set of autometer gauges, and as some might have noticed I put those gauges up for sale a few months ago(I still kind of like them but they don’t really fit the stockish vibe I want in the interior, PM if interested lol). Frankly the part of the project I most enjoyed was the wiring, being able to lay it out logically and cleanly with widely available bits and pieces was the fun part to me, and I’m still proud of the result, but the $300 worth of gauges they’re attached to… eh…
And that brings us back to the cluster, with the autometers it left the coolant and oil gauges effectively dead, as their senders were swapped to feed the autometers… now this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing as there’d been some erratic gremlins in the cluster gauges that partly prompted me to get the Autometers in the first place, but now that I’ve seen the accurate readouts and am cognizant of the cluster and by in large factory wiring shortcomings, it dawned on me that “what if I wired the factory senders and factory gauges like aftermarket gauges???” And fully isolated from the factory wiring that I can plug into the custom direct harness I made for the autometers? Well that was the last hours project!
Firstly get rid of the oil/temp receptacles off the cluster circuit
Nextly grind the closed pins of the oil and temp gauges to reveal their hollow cores…
Now to insert the remainder of the very same 16 gauge wires I used for the autometers into them…
And solder them solid
And of course heatshrink
Now that that’s done it’s simply a matter of running them trough the cluster and tidying them up
That’s it for today as I’m quite tired, but it’s the bulk of it. Next I’ll add terminals to this auxiliary cluster harness to the autometer harness I made earlier in the thread!
Side note the zip ties on the heat shrink tubes in the last pic are to stabilize the gauge cores against the housing. They’re a tad wobbly from the factory, which the deleted factory terminals normally secure. It’s undeniably hack, but it works!
