hey guys welcome back to the channel so in today's episode i just picked up this new
2is cluster from the junkyard so we're going to mess around with it
so i'm actually going to clone the mileage and all the information off my old cluster
onto this new one i'm going to pop the needles off and then show you guys the board and all the
leds inside in preparation to do an led swap i won't do the soldering and change out today just
for the sake of time then on the next episode i'll show you guys how to desolder the needles
and change the led backlighting if you choose to do that so stay tuned
to remove the trim for this cluster you got to remove this lower panel first so what you do is
you pop this outside panel usually you just get a fingernails in there or just just get a little
popper and just pop it right out and so this thing comes right out pretty easily right and then from
there everything else is kind of compression fit so just pop that out lost all my change so you
pop this out on this side and you can pop it out on the inside over here too and that comes right
out so once you get that panel out there's two clips right above here and then two more screws
down here i release the trim then once you do that so there's a little piece of leather that clips on
the top of this guy so you'll take a panel popper and just lift that thing up and there's like five
or six pegs that peg into this top cover that you can remove that leather so you don't rip it and
then you just pull that trim out and then once you pull the cluster out you got to be careful
i recommend if you've never pulled this out before put some painters tape on your screen because it's
very tight trying to get that out of the steering wheel make sure your tilt steering wheel is all
the way forward and down and then you got to slide it out the side so i'll show you how to do it in
a second put some painters tape just so i don't scratch up my screen even worse than it already
is mine's pretty beat up from when they change the dash out they weren't too careful with it
all the way down
for the low panner you just let it hang it doesn't need to come
all the way out look at the two phillips down here
it helps to get a short screwdriver to get these two little clips up here
just unscrew the center of the clip and then pull the clip out
once you have that get your little panel popper pop the leather out so there's four little pegs in
here now that we popped that out we can just pull this thing straight out careful not to break it
it comes right out and then now here's where it's kind of tricky with the cluster for the cluster if
you look inside there's actually two little clips up here that you just push up and it releases the
tabs on the top kind of pops in place and then pull it out here's where you have potential to
scratch your lens because the only way you can get it is to fold it down here pop your
harnesses and if it's the first time you've taken it out you may want to use this thing to pry your
harnesses out so release the two harnesses so this thing only comes out like the side so you got to
tilt it around the turn signal stock and then it's still jammed but so yeah that's
without that tape there it just scratches this thing up to help my original one i just took out
of the car this is that junkyard one i just bought recently you can tell that so same scratches from
when they removed it from the junkyard that scratched right here when they're trying to get
it out so that's very common so protect your lens so this one is actually off a 2008 and
this is mine's a 2007 so it's pretty much the same i think the part number went up one so this
one ends with an 81 and the 2008 ends with an 82 on the part number so i want to go ahead and
take apart the junkyard one i plugged that in their car and it's got 133 333 miles i'm gonna
open it up i'm gonna read the eprom on here i'm gonna open mine up i'm gonna read the eprom i'm
basically gonna transfer to whatever the reading is for the mileage in my eprom over to the new
cluster so that way i have matching miles if you haven't watched my is300 video where i programmed
the cluster go ahead watch that video i'll have a link up here in the corner so we'll go ahead
and start taking it apart so take this off you just take apart all the screws on the back here
once you get all the screws off there's only a couple clips that hold this back cover on there's
like three sets of clips that hold the middle the front and the back so you want to get the
just the back ones on so the top is not doesn't have any clips so you could lift the front here
and then find the couple that hold it back here release those
and just lift the back off so that's pretty easy and straightforward there
so inside here the eeprom is right here called ic2 on this particular cluster
so this cluster unlike the is300 cluster doesn't have any flux on it so you want to find the
ic2 chip which is ra57 the ra57 is the same as a c 56 eprom chip so you just want to clip it
the board should light up run and power if you do it correctly so we'll go inside the computer now
all right so we're in here now so i've got as programmer open so first thing i want to do is
just verify or detect the chip so we detect it as the 93c56 which is correct you can also always go
up to ic microwire and select the chip if you know what it is so we want to select that chip and we
want to do the read so we're going to read it and you can see right there so i'm going to save this
there we go this is the 2008-1333 i've got technosoft open to check the mileage so i'm
going to select my car which is alexis is 250 or 350 from 07 on the miles are stored under 0
6 according to this six will be f f c c e c f f then it repeats
f f c c e c so these bytes down here i don't know what they are but apparently there's something on
here at least so let's double check what it tells us when we put in 133 333 miles so that's one ccec
so that matches what we see over here in our cluster i'm gonna go ahead and run
my cluster so i took my cluster apart i'm gonna clip that same chip on here in the same location
everything's good the light came up correctly so we're going out of the computer now
all right so i'm in here i'm going to clear the buffer out so there's nothing in there
i'm going to detect the chip again it's reading the chip correctly and then i'm going to read
this chip right now my car's got like 97 000 miles on it so it says 88f6 is the mileage
so let me enter my mileage over here and check if that's correct 97715 i want to calculate that so
is there 88f6 so over here is correct eight eight f six so these are must be the smaller numbers
let's open up that other copy again and see what's going on there so over here we got side by side my
code and the replacement cluster code i'm going to copy this over exactly into the new cluster anyway
so i don't really care because i want the exact same mileage but i will play around with this off
camera to see what these numbers really translate to and how close they are to their real number so
i got the replacement cluster back up i've got my old rom here just verify that the chip is right
so i'm going to write this to that new replacement cluster
so success i want to clear the buffer
and read it again
88 f6 f6 all right so that is good i'm going to go ahead and clear this out so welcome to my lab
aka my home office so i've got this set up on the ground right now
got my test harnesses plugged into here with the power plugged in so i'm going
to turn on the transformer and see what the readings are after we program this cluster
so it looks like it copied over everything so after thinking about it i realized all the rest
of the numbers on the eprom dump were really the trip and the maintenance light indicator countdown
so if you notice here it's got 211.7 which on my original clusters which is the same number and
we go through the trip a and trip b if you look at trip b over here it's the same number 1 22 2
0.7 so that's exactly the same and then the odometer so the odometer number exactly the same
so we basically copied it over so i'm assuming if we zeroed out all those other numbers the
trip counters will probably be zero two and also your maintenance required light
is probably encoded in some of that information also so this is that cluster i found in el paso's
pull apart and it looks like it has 187 000 miles on it and it also has bad needle you can see that
tack needle is just kind of bouncing on and off speed needle right here looks like the tip of
it it's also burnt out so this is going to be a perfect candidate for needle repair all right
so what we're going to do now we're going to get the front and pull off the needles on here like
i was telling you guys earlier so to take off the front cover what you want to do is you want to pop
a couple clips there's only like two clips so there's one back here and then
one up here and those are the only two you need to release just to
take apart this so it's easier just to press with your thumb right here and then lift with this guy
and the top just squeeze in there it comes right off
put this off to the side put this case back onto here just so you have something to place it on
so now access to all the needles so here's where it gets tricky and you got to be careful so you
got your two needles that you need to take off that are usually go bad what you want to do is
these things spin basically almost infinitely and they go back to zero best bet is to take a picture
of your cluster where all your needles are before you take them apart like your gas needle usually
way before empty and your cold needles usually pass the c that way so what you want to do is move
it to like something like 30 or 40 miles per hour a number that you know and use something like this
right here which is a just a little popper get like a piece of cloth or something so you don't
scratch up the lens face because this face is kind of sensitive i did scratch this up with my nail
before so you want to get this under here kind of tuck it you want to grab grab the thing firmly
and then get this underneath and just pry it and it pops off so inside you're going to find
two contacts that go into there thing is you could spin the thing around what you want to
do is if you put it back in and it doesn't go back to zero to your original position you got
to basically move it back pull it off again and fine tune it until it goes to zero or the at rest
same with the rpm so the rpm move it to something that you can remember like a three
or two get the tool underneath grab it firmly make sure you stay on your two
and then pop it right off so the first time you do it it's gonna be pretty tough and tight i
think i've i've done this one before so that's why it's a little bit easier to pop off but it
feels like you're gonna break it but you won't be breaking it the temperature and fuel needle
aren't as bad they don't have a led on them to access the leds behind you have to pop these off
so you can take the board off so what you want to do is same thing you want to keep it like a
middle position that's probably the easiest way to reference get this thing underneath
these things break pretty oop this one popped off so i want to jb weld that back on
get this thing underneath still and just pry it up
this needle is pretty brittle because especially how old the clusters are
but all it is is plastic welds that hold it in
and they they break pretty easily so a little bit of super glue will get that back into place
that pops off pretty easily there so i was mentioning earlier how easy it is to scratch
this face right here you can see some of my prime marks and my fingernail marks right here on the
empty uh the needle actually scratched it when i was turning it and putting it too close to there
so yeah these things are pretty delicate as far as scratching same with the cold right here luckily
the lens on this guy is tinted so these things you don't even see and especially since this
thing is basically backlit all the time when the car is on you can't really see those anyways all
right so now that we've got the needles out we put these off to the side but what we want to do
now is we want to pull the board off so now that we've separated you can just lift this thing up
and the board should come right off on the back there are a couple of retaining things that
hold it on the first thing you want to do is pop the the ribbon cable right here for the display
that that thing just release the clip after that you just tab up here and a tab down here
that hold it on but yeah just kind of lift it out and then it just should pop right out
the main thing that's holding it in are the needles right here for the lcd screen for
the mileage and then lcd up here which is the park so that's the only ones that you have to
kind of pry off but you slowly do it on both sides just make sure you get around the clip
happens every time these two little plastic things that fell out there the reflectors for
the needles and then here there's going to be a ton of leds so looking close to that board
you see leds everywhere these are the plcc2s which i think they're the same thing as 1280s
this is the gas needle right here and that's the temperature needle and it's got two white ones
right there and two white ones over here one of the things that you'll notice even on your factory
one is that white on the needles don't even mat as far as color goes because of the way they're lit
that one's optically lit directly onto the needle this one is optically lit to that little reflector
and then it makes the turn on the needles over here so it's a little bit different so that's why
the colors are a little bit off no matter how good your leds are they're never going to match exactly
as far as all the leds on there a lot of them are the check engine lights and all the different
check lights on the car what you'll notice is all the white ones which are for the illumination or
they're like they're kind of yellowish you'll see the yellow lines so all around the gauge cluster
here there's yellow there's yellow on the outside and you'll notice on the inside there's a group
two that's that warning ring remember you could set the orange warning rings for your mile per
hour and your rpm those are for that up here you got the some more white ones up here which are for
the illumination of the lcd i believe all in all there's 29 white illumination leds that you could
change the rest of these are different warning lights and everything and then down the center
here is like your park and your drive and all that and then there's one right here which is a white
one i think that's a little display which tells you the number that you're in when you're in the
tiptronic but overall should be a pretty easy desolder and solder if you have an air solder
hey guys thanks for tuning in all the way to the end of this episode on disassembling that cluster
and showing you how to take the needles off and everything so i've got all the parts on order all
the leds that i'm going to need i want to change the needles and everything to blue and i might do
the whole cluster blue or i might leave some of it blue and some of it white so stay tuned for
my next episode where i actually take apart the needles and show you the leds and what's involved
in doing all those leds if you're not already following me on instagram head on over there and
give me a follow i usually post finished products as i get them done on these different projects i
do so anyways thanks for watching all the way the end and i'll catch you guys on the next one see ya
you