Howdy all, I've got my gauge cluster laying in front of me all disassembled and had some questions for people that have done this repair before. I know that there's a thread with the locations of the fuel gauge resistors to be soldered (https://g35driver.com/forums/g35-sed...etailed-5.html) but I also have an intermittent left-turn signal light and bad lighting at around 20mph on the speedometer as well as intermittent manual mode shifts. My questions are as follows:

1. Does anybody know what to solder to repair the signal light/backlighting/manual mode? I've been checking online and diagrams are either behind paywalls or I can't understand them. They don't seem to line up with the wiring on the cluster, but I'm not an electrician.
2. Do people reflow the solder with heat or add a tiny amount of solder to each point to reinforce it? I've soldered radio wiring before, but a circuit board is a different animal and I really don't want to break this thing. Tempted to just re-do all existing solder points to protect against future issues, but that might be overboard.

Family got me a soldering kit a few months back and I've been itching to use it, but I'm tempted to send it to either the Texas guy on Ebay (not back til end of June) or the NJ guy (lot further away/less reviews).

Help is much appreciated!

 

Personally I would just reflow everything on the board to see what (if anything) it fixes, then deep dive into actually replacing components that are still broken.

 

find something to practice on first if it's your first time soldering. you don't want to make things worse than they are now by mucking up all your connections. watch some videos or something at least. i would also do them all if you don't know specifically what components are related to the symptoms you're having. i soldered just the resistors for the fuel gauge and it fixed my problem perfectly but i didn't have any other problems though.

 

Buy another cluster from eBay or your local salvage shop to practice on. It's not hard it's just a matter of being able to feel/see that exact moment where the solder melts.

 

Had a technician friend at work give it a go, fuel gauge/turn signal works 100% now! However, he self-admittedly had the solder a bit chunky as he didn't have his fine-tip pen with him at work that day. Manual mode is on the fritz again, so I'm going to tear it apart sometime and give it another go. Manual mode seems to work fine immediately after the pedal-dance resets are performed, but my guess is that it's related to weird resistances inside the cluster now. Would an excessive amount of solder on a resister with no bridging cause a resistance issue? Outside of PC's electronics aren't my strong suit.

Going to double check and possibly just re-do every joint on the board, just to cover my bases. Can't live without the manual mode!

 

If it's not accidentally bridged when it's fine, since the MM works but then intermittently stops I'm thinking the issue is in the MM switches on the shifter.