I have a bad gauge cluster and will be replacing it in a few days. I ordered a new one with a tach in it, my current one dosnt have a tach. my question would be will the tach work with the standard plug or will I have to wire it in somehow. Also there is no odom. on it, will the digital one on my old cluster move over to the new one

It would help to know what car you have and what car the cluster is from.

sorry forgot to add that.. I have a 99 rs and not sure what the cluster is from. I ordered it from a parts dealer and they only said that it would fit in the 3rd gens up to 1999, I take it that from 2000 on the clusters are different.

You dont have to do any wiring for the tach and what do you mean the new one doesnt have an odometer?

Digital odom is for 00+ and has a bcm to store the mileage. If you have an old spinney mechanical type you gotta get the same style for a replacement.. If they sold you a digital one, then they sent you the wrong one.


01 cav w/01 3400 gam gt 4t45e

the space for the odometer has an empty window. I have done mods to my old cavy but never got into taking the cluster apart and not sure if the odometer comes out and can be placed on a different cluster. the 99's came with both analog odometers the first half of the year and digital the second half. swo im not sure if this has anything to do with it or not. Here is a pic of what im talking about. Cluster

it will plug right in and. you will have to bolt the mecanisim for the odom. from your old cluster to the new one. you should have gotten one from a yard, thats what i did when i went from no tach to having a tach, i reduced my mileage from 124k to 41k lol

lol. Cool deal. so the tach will work. Kinda sux that the wiring is there and they didnt put one on to begin with. So im guessing the only diffrence between an RS and an LS is painted bumpers, a tach, a remote trunk release and side mouldings. My odometer is digital and the computer stores the mileage on it. so ill still have the same milage

The odometers both unbolt? But the bcm is what sends the data to the digital odometer, through serial data to the cluster. Thats the wildest thing I have heard , I dont even think the serial data clusters have the same motors that run the gauges as the mechanical. As far as I knew If you had a serial data cluster and wanted to swap to a tach cluster, you could in fact just swap it out. But you couldnt cross years from digital to mechanical. Let me know how that goes. Im curious to see about that half year thing.


01 cav w/01 3400 gam gt 4t45e

green99 wrote:My odometer is digital and the computer stores the mileage on it. so ill still have the same milage

Ur mileage is stored in the cluster itself so the new cluster will show the mileage of whatever car it was in before. Not a big deal if you write ur current mileage down somewhere.

both my gauge clusters are/ were mecanical and looking at the old one i still have the mecanical mecanisim does unbolt. not sure about the digital stuff tho

Jo Mx... wrote:Digital odom is for 00+ and has a bcm to store the mileage. If you have an old spinney mechanical type you gotta get the same style for a replacement.. If they sold you a digital one, then they sent you the wrong one.

Actually...

Some 98's, and all 99's (Cavaliers) had digital odo's. I'm not sure on the Sunfire years, but I think all sunfires had digital odo's. They store the mileage in the cluster, so there is no BCM needed on the 99-'s. The problem is that only the dealer can reprogram the mileage in the cluster, and most of them won't do it (they send it out).

The cluster will work, it'll just start counting miles from whatever it has in it (0 if new, whatever it had if its a junkyard pull). If you don't have it fixed before you put it in to show the correct mileage you can't sell your car as actual miles anymore, it has to be marked in the title as estimated.





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Question about that. Does the cluster itself save the mileage somewhere, or just the odometer part. Because he did say that he's going to have to swap the odometer over. I've never gotten to look at a digital odo. on these clusters, so I have no idea what parts are to it.

Oh , I didnt know that any 98's and 99's had digital odom. My wifes 98 has a mechanical, so I figured that none did., I had a 99 fire gt a while back. I dont remember which it had. It may have had a digital, I didn t have it long before I resold it.


01 cav w/01 3400 gam gt 4t45e

SHOoff (Tuner Bash Beer God) wrote:Question about that. Does the cluster itself save the mileage somewhere, or just the odometer part. Because he did say that he's going to have to swap the odometer over. I've never gotten to look at a digital odo. on these clusters, so I have no idea what parts are to it.

Its stored in the cluster, I don't believe that the odo part is removable like it is with the mechanical ones, so the mileage is stored on a memory chip on the cluster.





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My 98 rs has the digital odometer, which is now only showing every other number, i am having trouble finding a replacement with the digital.

The late-98 through 99 digital clusters (even those with tachs) show up on eBay fairly often. On my car, the intermittent flickering or random digit darkness was affected by pushing the trip odometer switch/reset, so I got in the habit of resetting it at every gas fill up. Now all the digits appear quite reliably. - Mark

with the 98-99 odo you can remove the ODO, its a separate circuit baord with the screen attached to it it plugs in like say a memory card or video card would on you computer
or for you old schoolers tha tnever seen in a computer the same way nintendo NES, SNES, N64 games pluged into the console

should be able to remove the odo and swap it

95-97 had mechanical and apparrently early 98 i have never seen a 98 with mechanical but car-parts is listing it
98-99 had digital

wether it was cavalier or sunfire



JBO since July 30, 2001

NOTa2_4 wrote: with the 98-99 odo you can remove the ODO, its a separate circuit baord with the screen attached to it it plugs in like say a memory card or video card would on you computer...should be able to remove the odo and swap it

I've been wanting to test this theory, but since you've had one apart, are they the same plug that the mechanical ones use? I have been thinking that you can swap the 98-99 digital ODO with the 95-98 mechanical one. Especially since they changed it in mid-98, I've been wondering if the same pulse signal is just sent to the ODO, and the memory is all on the ODO board.

Jo Mx... wrote:Oh , I didnt know that any 98's and 99's had digital odom. My wifes 98 has a mechanical, so I figured that none did., I had a 99 fire gt a while back. I dont remember which it had. It may have had a digital, I didn t have it long before I resold it.

Yup, my 98 has a digital one.

I took my cluster assembly totally apart today when i was changing out my rear window defrost switch, and I found out that the only difference in the set up with a tach and without a tack is basicly this.
1. 4 contacts for the new location of the temp sensor are not added to the non tach unit.
2. no tach unit.
So I would stand to guess this saved GM a grand total of 3 or 4 bucks there cost to build each unit without a tach.
as for the difference in the non digital and digital I wouldnt know. Tomorrow when my new cluster gets here I will pull it apart and snap pics and post them so we can compare them.
As for the missing odometer I have to put my old one into the new one, its a pretty simple operation .

Ok got the new cluster in, it came with a digital odometer, which I had already, so I wasnt able to see if the connections were the same as the analogue. Now my odometer reads 163k when the car only has 133k. I swaped out the odometers and the same thing, so the mileage is stored some place on the cluster its self. So now my question would be how do i get it reset to the original mileage.

green99 wrote:Ok got the new cluster in, it came with a digital odometer, which I had already, so I wasnt able to see if the connections were the same as the analogue. Now my odometer reads 163k when the car only has 133k. I swaped out the odometers and the same thing, so the mileage is stored some place on the cluster its self. So now my question would be how do i get it reset to the original mileage.

Well, that answers the question of being able to swap a digital and mechanical odometer. If the memory is in the main board, it's obviously sending a display signal only to the odometer.

Unfortunately, you can't reset the memory. A dealership may be able to, but if they can, they would probably only do it if you brought it to them with the original cluster in the car, as if you had never touched it. And then you'd have to pay them to do the swap.

yep dealership only. I had that same problem on an 02, but I had to change the BCM on it. Same problem, but the mileage was ZERO.


01 cav w/01 3400 gam gt 4t45e

Yea, having the dealer do that would have cost me a bit. I ended up taking both clusters to a computer repair place, they removed 4 square electrical connectors from the temp gauge on the new cluster and putting them on the original cluster board. then all i had to do is swap the gauges and face and I was good to go. only cost me 20 bucks, the dealer wanted 200.