Gauges & blinkers not working - only ABS light, and airbag light at startup, work

[avgraphics]

My instrument cluster & blinkers all suddenly stopped working. This includes the backlighting on the cluster.

A few things I found online detail a process of removing and replacing 3 fuses.. however this did not work for me.

To illustrate the problem I made a short video that I included below.

Please help!

[dworthy]

So what fuses did you replace?

F10; F34; F43

What you maybe looking at here is a bad ignition switch, so with the ignition on, check Fuse 34 for power.

Also you can check the Ignition switch fuses: F50; F105; F106

F106 Specifically feeds power to the switch that sends it out to F34.

[Cwharris]

I completely agree with Dworthy.. My car had almost the exact same symptoms. New ignition switch and problems have been solved.

[avgraphics]

UPDATE:

I was continuing my research and found an instance of a successful fix where fuse 43 was left out for an extended period of time to permit any residual energy to fully discharge. It seemed like a worthwhile thing to try so out came the fuse last night & this afternoon I put it back. As others who have had success with this fix have mentioned, I heard a buzzing sound for a couple seconds.. then after turning the key I got all my gauges and blinkers working again. Woohooo!!! I few alert lights stayed lit till the car was driven around a bit. I'm still going to reset the check engine light - then it looks like I'm all fixed up.

BIG THANKS to ETAction on zhpmafia.com!! The details of his experience doing this fix is at the link below:

http://www.zhpmafia.com/forums/showt...035#post515035

[Kzin2]

Clearly, cluster needed to be re-booted,
sounds to me like some capacitors are getting funky, and/or there's a poor ground.

Fully discharging the capacitors (by pulling voltage source: fuse 43) and dissipating all voltage is what you're doing.

*IF* that's what behind the weirdness, a quicker way would be to remove both battery
cables, then, with neither one connected to battery, touch them together, and leave them
like that for an hour or three. Caps should discharge immediately, but there might be some
other components (diodes ?) in the circuit, that might keep residual voltage in caps, & slow the process.
Will check with my engineering buddy on residual voltage idea.

[Kenny167]

Hi all, reviving this dead thread since I'm also having this issue. I found this thread and it helped solve the issue the first time, by discharging as described. However, now it has gotten stuck again, and seemingly nothing is working to get it back. I've since replaced the battery, and tried all kinds of ways to discharge the cluster but none have succeeded.

Being an electrical engineer, I figured I could make some sense of this, but I haven't been able to try anything other than just shorting the circuit to dissipate residual voltage. On top of the cluster issue, occasionally the car won't start, but will happily crank forever. After waiting a few minutes, it'll start just fine. Also, one of the rear vent windows is somehow reversed? On one side, up is open and down is close, but the other side is the opposite. I can't explain how this could even happen unless someone re-wired the switches wrong...

All in all, I feel that there's a bad ground or something is going on with the circuit powering the GM5, DME, and IKE causing strange issues across the board. Since the issues are relevant to 3 different modules, I don't think any one of them is solely responsible, which is why I'm suspecting a bad ground or noisy voltage causing general issues.
Any insight is appreciated.

[MarcoZandrini]

Check your ignition switch.