We were suppose to have cold rainy not fun weather today. Worked the last 5 days at the mountain and since I wasn’t scheduled today, I decided to tackle my gauge cluster issue. Of course it ended up being pretty nice all day. Coulda detailed but we are expecting more rain the next couple days. Anyways I’m actually proud of myself for diving into this and glad it’s now done and one less thing to think about.
So in 2018 I scored an Escalade cluster from a reputable eBay seller. Ordered a white esky gauge overlay and blue needles with silver bases. Shipped it off to Scotty on the east coast and he installed the updated better stepper motors and blue LED back lighting. He did a great job with it.
A couple of years ago, I wanna say at east two, I noticed flickering here and there in the lighting. It’s gotten worse since and I’ve just been living with it because I just didn’t have the time or the energy to deal with it. Well it finally got annoying enough to where I was like “ok I gotta deal with this…” reached out to
@ScottyBoy and asked if he had any recommendations on what I’d need to do. When i looked back at the thread he started when he did the upgrades in the cluster I was able to see the photos and determine that he’d used LED strips for the back lighting instead of using single LED bulbs. He said it was likely that the LED strips were going bad, and not the solder joints being bad like I’d originally thought. Definitely sounded logical to me. I checked out some sites to look for some strips but couldn’t find anything that might work so I ended up ordering a pack of single LEDs.
Went to good ole’ college of YouTube and watched some videos on using a soldering iron. Had one sitting in a box for a few years and never opened up. Found a GREAT video on YouTube of a guy doing a silvy cluster where he actually showed soldering in new bulbs and I figured well sheetz I may as well give this a go and try it… so glad I did because it wasn’t terribly complicated. I took my time and very carefully soldered in new bulbs. The negative pads on the component board were already marked and I’m guessing that was Scotty’s handy work… thanks man that was a big help in figuring out which way to install the bulbs! Plus the guy on the YouTube vid said that most of the LED bulbs had longer leads coming off for positive side and that turned out to be the case for the LEDs I ordered. Get em all installed the right way on my first try which was rad. First photo was me plugging the cluster in with just the LEDs to make sure they all were soldered in correct.
