Lost all guage illumination
 

yep, sure did.. As well as any illumination for the switches and AC control panel.

Checked fuses and even replaced them and still nothing. It was weird, I was driving just fine with everything illuminated and stopped to fuel up and turned the car back on and had nothing illuminated.

After playing with it I decided to check fuses and replaced the fuses for the illumination of switches and gauges..

any ideas?

Rheostat?

maybe, I did not even think of fiddling with that.. I actually haven't touched it since I got the car

Just by-pass the rheostat,solder a wire across the 2 terminals on the rheostat itself until you can get a new one, or just leave it like that.


Wiggle the knob back and forth first.

yep mine was all the way down and when I went to turn it up nothing the dash lights would just flicker, indicative of a bad connection somewhere. I sprayed some contactor cleaner into the dimmer rod clearance of the dash, (carefully). I havent had a problem since. Bad grounds do terrible things.

Have a great day!

move your dimmer a bit. They will come back quickly. If not, the grounding circuit in the speedometer grid may be shorted.

its the rheostat.. played with it and they came back.. I dont know why I did not think of that.

looks like I might need a new one.


edit..

screw that I am not paying $90-120 for a rheostat...I'll do the solder trick.

If you "wipe" the contact by turning the knob back and forth many, many times it will often solve the problems with a rheostat that has some dead spots and also revive those which are DOA. Be patient and just keep turning. Sometimes they are beyond repair but often times after a few hundred "wipes" they work perfectly.

I managed to repair an old rheostat I had for my 300D, simply by (CAREFULLY!) disassembling it, and using electronics cleaner to make sure the contacts are shiny and clean. Granted, if the guts of it are falling apart, this trick won't work - but it did for me. A little brillo to gently scrub any corrosion off the contacts can help, too.

I did this to mine, let it dry off, carefully reassembled it, and now I have working rheostat again. If all else fails? The soldered wire trick always works.