Why do the guages on my 1995 Neon only work intermittently?
It is probably a bad connection inside the guage cluster. You could get one from a salvage yard, but it won’t be cheap. Call you’re local used parts dealer and ask for the price.
LOL, hate to interrupt; but have you checked the ground connection from the cluster. I ended up running a separate ground on one of my cars.
I have not checked the ground yet. I cleaned all the connections on the bulkhead plugs, but it didn’t help. I haven’t done much because they work about 40% of the time. I was just hoping that this was a common problem that someone would know an easy fix for. It could be a bad ground. I have a chilton manual. I guess I could figure out which one is ground. It used to be mainly the speedo. that didn’t work. Now all 3, speed , temp., and fuel don’t work. Do you remember how you fixed it?
My car is an old benz that had “jumpy” gauges. i simply ran a wire from a metal portion of the instrument cluster to a ground point under the dash. Apparently their was a bad internal ground someplace. I knew it was a common problem because all the instruments were jumping “together” and I assumed it was a ground issue.
Hi Craig.
Ya, my speedometer jumps sometimes. But they don’t all jump at once. I wish. I’ll look into it closer now that I know I am not the only person with this very annoying problem. It is very annoying to have jumping guages isn’t it? It makes me want to drive the car off of a cliff. My main problem is the fuel guage. Not knowing how much fuel I have is frustrating. I wish my tank had a factory equipped dipsick in the fuel tank so I could just check it before I drove. The old Caterpillar bulldozers had these and I think it was a very good idea.
I suggest you check the power to the gauges also, using a meter.
OK. I’m going to check power and ground! Maybe I’ll even change the oil if I can get the stupid guages to work. I really don’t know how many miles it has been because the stupid odometer doesn’t work most of the time either. Thank you for the help.
You can always just reset your odometer when you fill-up, than you have some idea how much fuel you have left. Works on my motorcycle.