all the neddles in dash jumping back and forth..lost spedometer altogether
7 Answers
First guess is a malfunctioning Vehicle Speed Sensor on the transmission which sends the electrical impulses to your speedometer and odometer, or a short in a wire from the VSS to speedometer
My 2003 Windstar does the exact same thing. If I bang the dashboard it usually fixes it so I'm assuming the problem is in the cluster itself.
Debbie..... did you get this problem resolved? The common cause of this problem is the main cable connecting to the printed board inside the head assembly (where the guages are) has a broken solder connection (usually the ground connection solder failed, from age and it loses then gets then loses ground connection). You need to remove the entire guage head assembly (Takes time, but not extremely difficult). There are several video on Youtube.
Have the same problem as Skunk1019 above. Can you recommend a good video for this fix? Thank you!
I fixed mine by taking the instrument panel out and taking it apart from the back to expose the 4 pins on the back of each gauge. They were oxidized badly. Some steel wool to polish them up put the panel back in and problem solved. The threads about broken pins on the ribbon connectors, bad ground wire on the harness are all red herrings IMHO.
My experience was the same as GuruPPRRC. Cleaned the 4 pins on the back of each gage using sandpaper. Also took the opportunity to squeeze together each of the 16 clips on the circuit board that are supposed to connect to the pins. Put the instrument panel back in the car and it is now working like new.
