azoufan

I had the DTE error on my cluster several times, all points lead to bad gas and a screwed up sending unit. Since then my fuel gauge never worked well. It has since just given up, the odometer and miles to empty still works, so I've been monitoring my fuel level like that for well over a year now. A month or two ago the tach started flaking out. It would stick sometimes, get all screwed up, show 0 RPM's at start or show me running at 6K RPM's doing 40 Mph in 5th gear. I had installed the white faced gauges and decided to check them out, maybe the backing was coming off and holding the tach needle or something. Nope, there's about 1/4" of clearance there, but I decided to go back to the black gauge face anyway.

When I pulled it off and the needles, I noticed that the fuel gauge would hardly turn at all, like it was stuck or gummed up inside, pretty weird. Sure enough, since putting it back in the gauge just doesn't move. Previously it was pointing nearly straight down, hasn't moved right for some time now. The tach needle however felt pretty good, almost the same as the others, could turn it fine, etc. Put it back in, started it up, all looked good for the first 2 days. Well today it acted up again, on the way home from work it showed me at 0 RPM's at idle as well as all the way up to redline when I was actually closer to maybe 2500 RPM's.

I've seen a couple of threads pointing to the PIE AUX adapter for the mp3 players, and I have one. It has the updated chip that fixes the battery drain issue and has worked well for some time. The fuel error that comes from the bad gas was before the PIE adapter, and the fuel gauge was having issues before I ever installed it. The tach however is a new issue, but I've had the PIE adapter in for over a year. The battery, oil pressure, temp and speedometer gauges seem to function just fine, for now. So is it really the PIE adapter, or is my cluster jacked? I've been thinking of installing a GT500 cluster as I really want the tach on the right, but I'm not going to do that if I'm just going to fry it by using the PIE adapter.

I've read about people removing their PIE adapter and then disconnecting their battery for an hour, and all is well. Not sure if I have the same symptoms here, would love to hear from those in the know. I don't have an issue with getting rid of the PIE adapter, but I'll be pretty bummed about it, I use the heck out of that thing. Thanks for everyone's input!