Jumpy temp/fuel gauges fixed!!! (archive)

For those of you who wanted to know how to fix this problem, I've finally figured it out (at least for my car). It turns out that it was all due to bad grounding of the gauge actuators themselves.

I had been fooling around with these things for some time and it seemed no matter what I did, I couldn't get the gauges (especially temp.) to stop fluttering around when the car warmed up and/or when I turned on electrical stuff. I finally ended up going into the instrument cluster, removing the guages from their mounts (hex nuts) on the circuit board, getting some wire and nylon spacers (put the nylon spacers in between the circuit board and the guage ground- i.e. the stud so that the gauge cannot ground itself to the circuit board when you tighten it down with the hex nut). I then took the wire and wrapped it around the stud on the bottom of the circuit board (between the metal spacer and the hex nut) and tightened it down.

At this point the only way to ground the gauges is to take the other ends of the wires and hook them up to some arbitrary grounding point on the chassis. This is just exactly what I did. For some reason this solved all my jumpy guage problems. I don't know how or where but the ground in the circuit board where the guages were hooked up to must have been very weak. It was a pain but I guess perseverance pays off.

Nick
'84 733i
195k in the NE

Follow Ups:

Re: Jumpy temp/fuel gauges fixed!!! Kevin Heiner 14:54 1/20/2002 (0)

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