I'm going to be putting in my white face guages sometime in the next couple of days. I was just wondering if any of you that installed your own had any tips or suggestions to make things go smoothly. Are there any problems I should watch out for, or any easy way to do things? Any input would be greatly appreciated!

 

Pull the cluster, its easy just gotta remove a few screws and pop off the headlight switch. If its an overlay its simple you just crack the cluster open (err remove the front cover) and lay em on top of your current gauges. If their replacements then you gotta remove the needles. I found it easiest to take a picture of them on your car right before you start with the car fully warm and running. Then remove the needles with a fork or something (that you can apply even pressure to remove them, they just slide off but you don't want to bend the pen their mounted on). Swap the gauge faces and get back in the car and crank it up and wait for it to be warm (cluster has to be plugged in for the car to run). Once warm put the stuff like water temp, oil press, fuel amt ect back on the same place as in the picture you took then turn off the car and put the cluster in diagnostic mode so you can get a digital readout of the rpm's and mph. Drive down the road in fairly high rpm's - like 4k or something and hold it there while you set that needle on - then do the same thing for the speedo. The faster your speed the more accurate it will be - if your 2 mph off at 20mph then it will be 8 mph off at 80 - but if your going 80 and get 2 mph off then you'll only be .5 mph off at 20. Anyways you get my drift. Damn I typed alot [&:]

 

Isn't that rather dangerous to be driving down the road at a fast speed whilst trying to put your gages on?

 

Considering we just got a s**t load of snow here, I think I'll have to look for other options. What do you think it would cost to have someone put them in?

 

You can put them back on without having the car moving. Before you take the needles off of your old guages, take the little stopper pins off the tach and speedo and draw yourself a picture(on a post-it, paper, etc.) of where they line up. Then you put the new guages on, line them up with the picture and test it out with the digital speedo/tach. I did this with my old v6 and the guages were not of from what i could tell.