Well, I just finished putting in new gauge faces in my S4 Turbo. After rewiring the harness' for a S5 N/A cluster and getting the gauge faces in, I re-installed it. When I took it out for a drive, the speedo needle was bouncing erratically (sp) from 0 to 160 and everywhere in between. My question is, when I put the gauge faces on, could I have pushed the speedo needle to the point where it is now screwed up? I was also thinking that when slipping the speedo cable back onto the cluster, maybe I pulled on it a little to hard and screwed that up. Any feedback on this would be really helpful!

Thanks!

 

speedo cable would be the first thing I would look at

 

thats weird because mine now bounces a bit. not alot but more now that before i installed my gauges

 

What should I look for with the speedo cable?

 

I had the same problem for a while, mainly when it was freezing outside. Then one day the cable snapped, so I would look at the speedo cable for sure. I'm sure they were related somehow.

 

This happened to me as well, right before i lost the internal speedo cable.

It came loose from the tranny and the internal on fell out, but right before it came totally loose it was jumping all over, just barely catching on the little dealy inside the tranny.

 

when I put on white faced gauges on my old '86 the same thing happened. It ended up that I just hadnn't plugged in the speedo back into the gauge bezel. Hope that helps.



Ira

 

Just an update with a little more info:

When my car is just sitting and I am not moving, the speedometer is reading 40 mph and while I am driving, it sounds like there is a strange sort of grinding noise coming from the odometer or from behind the speedometer. Hope this can help a little!

 

My wifes car does that when its driving. Sitting still it goes to 0, but above 40 mph it makes that sound and it bounces up and down. I took the speedometer out and looked at it. I noticed that while the cable goes in a continuous 360 degree circle, the needle doesn't travel around the gauge 360 degrees. There is a funny looking thing on the back of the gauge that looks like a bell. It spins 360 degrees, and I think, though I am not 100% sure, but I think its magnetic or something. But somehow, this thing changes the speed of the cable which is spinning 360* into a lesser degree of motion on the needle and gauge. So my deduction is that the speedometer itself is bad. Also, I changed the cable and the problem didn't go away. I ruled out the speedometer gear box on the tranny because the grinding sound comes from the dash.

 

Thanks for the replies everyone. Anyway, after talking with the local speedometer repair shop, I have decided that the problem is more than likely within the instrument cluster itself. I am removing it and taking it to them hopefully before this weekend so that they find out exactly what the problem is. I will let all of you know exactly what happened so that I might save someone in the future from f'ing up their speedometer when swapping gauge faces. Thanks again!