Hopefully, the cluster will be as obvious as the CC...pulled the bin, looked inside and there it was. The morons that had the car before me had hacked wires under the bin to kill power to bin lights and something else that I can't figure out. The bin wires were obvious. Two blue wires are a mystery, but they had cut one of the wires going to the cruise control module apparently as an accident. It was merely twisted together and then "electric taped" to keep it together......the tape was coming off, the wires were goosey, so I soldered and shrink wrapped the connection. I went ahead and pulled the module, took it apart and cleaned what I could, though it had no burns or obvious oxidation paths.

It's all together now and working like usual, but the Metroplex won't get any temps above 85 F until Wednesday, so I won't know until then if that really was the problem. I'll report back then since it's supposed to hit 93 F or so.

 

Thread from the dead comes back because the answer was discovered two months ago when AnB Auto center dropped the new bullet in the '84, now painted year 2000 DC Solar Yellow, a Neon car color.

Kent was right. Once Sam pulled the gauge housing out of the driver's console, he found the back side had chipped a corner and cracked across a part of the printed circuit board...so the nimrods who had owned the car before me used a bit of wire and soldered a bridge in....that promptly burned up once the barrel dimmer switch was replaced and working again. I had put up with the "no dash lights" problem all these years and just asked Sam to fix it somehow and charge me whatevr he wanted because I never took the time to pull the car apart. It's been a daily driver since March of 2008(?) when Furious' 12A popped an apex seal.

So there you go. Circuit board. But now I've got a nice rat pack of barrel dimmers that I know are all good for this car and my Parent's 85 GSL for the foreseeable future!


Mario III

 

Resurrecting this thread with a couple questions:

1) The instructions here for popping out the dimmer switch were very helpful in getting mine out. However: once I popped it, it wouldn't pull out far enough to reach the connector. How do you actually get at the physical block connector in order to disconnect it and replace it? Is it supposed to pull out far enough so the connector comes through the hole? (I.e., is mine potentially suffering from some unforeseen work by a PO?)

2) If the connector is *not* supposed to pull out through the front opening, I assume I will need to remove the plastic panel where the dimmer switch (and various other controls) are mounted. I've tried removing the 3-4 visible screws that seem to be associated with that panel, but it doesn't budge. Can anyone provide explicit instructions on how to take off that panel?

Hope this makes sense, any help appreciated, thanks!

 

Without chopping your hands up, try to get to the space behind where the dimmer is located and you're going to "feel" the wires and connector are tied down or clamped to some other object. Once you untangle it from that, the connector can just barely make it out of the whole to squeeze the sides and release it. There's no need to remove anything else.

 

Awesome, thanks for the detailed response!