Does anyone know how to bench test a gauge cluster to see the lights? When I modded my first cluster I had to go out to the truck every time, I've seen people do it but I haven't seen a "how to"

Or please direct me to the thread that has this info

 

Bump

 

Do you have an extra set of wiring connectors for the cluster?
If so, you can connect all the black wires together to ground & the red/black wires together to power.

I honestly don't know which pins in the connectors go to what wire, but next time I've got mine out I'll see if I can trace down the connections on the cluster.

In the meantime, here's the only good pic I have of the back of one of my old clusters where I marked the polarity for the backlighting:


I'd be willing to bet $0.25 that if you connect power & ground to one of those socket connections, it would feed power to the rest of them or at least the rest on that circuit.

 

I don't have any connectors but that would make this easier. What size battery would I need to use? All I'm looking to do is light up the cluster to check the lighting

BTW, how are those ***** coming? I'm still wanting the white LED bulbs for my cluster and HVAC

 

i have an extra set of plugs i used when i did mine. i ended up getting two 6 volt flash light batteries and wired them together. worked great.

 

Do you still have a need for the plugs?

 

probably not, but i honestly don't even know where they are right now.

 

If you're gonna be using led's to test in the cluster, a plain old 9v battery from a smoke detector should work.
If you're gonna be using incandescent bulbs, I'd suggest getting a 12v dc wall wart power adapter from some old electronic device & using that for your power. As long as it has 1000mA or 1A of DC output, it should be good even when using incandescent bulbs.
It will work the same for led's, just need to check the polarity on the wires. I've made & used several of them over the years. They're cheap & handy to use & if it happens to fly across the shop & smash into a million pieces, I'm only out a few bucks

I'm way behind on getting more **** inserts made up, but I may have one set done