Refurbishing a W124 instrument cluster – Part 4: Installation and testing

Last night I finished the installation of the refurbished W124 instrument cluster. I’m really happy with it, and its really lifted the car.

I ended up installing it as part of my failed attempt to change the centre vent. Even after changing the bulb, the vent illumination was not working. I realized that it must require the instrument cluster to be plugged in. This proved to be the case, and also fixed the illumination for the outside temperature gauge.

Before I re-installed the cluster, I added more ATF to the speedometer cable. This is an attempt to lubricate it and […]

Refurbishing a W124 instrument cluster – Part 3: Changing the housing

In this series I am refurbishing my W124 instrument cluster. In the first part, I removed the cluster and lubricated the speedo cable. For the second part, I repaired the W124 outside temperature display. Now I am focused on my instrument cluster which is afflicted with the dreaded white spot disease.

While I was in the UK for work in January, I purchased a good used W124 instrument cluster housing. My plan was to transfer my instruments and electronics to that new housing. The actual gauge faces were in good condition. It’s been on my to do list ever since […]

Refurbishing a W124 instrument cluster – Part 1: Lubricating the speedo cable

Ever since I bought my W124, there have been a couple of things about my instrument cluster I was not very happy with.

It had the dreaded ‘white spot’ disease. Not just on the instrument cluster surround, but the inside of the glass too. The outside temperature LCD was all cloudy and difficult to read. The speedometer needle jumped around at low speed.

I assume the white spot is some kind of mould. it seems to affect cars that have spent time in the tropics or humid environments the most – e.g. Hong Kong, Singapore, Queensland etc. My car spent […]

Citroen DS Instrument cluster repair

Earlier in the week I had identified the lack of instrument cluster lighting was due to a crack in the instrument cluster circuit board. The crack was causing an intermittent broken circuit. I wasn’t able to find much on the internet about Citroen DS Instrument cluster repair. Looking at the board it looked like a very simple design. That gave me the confidence to come up with my own solution.

The easiest course of action would have been to solder a wire in place. I didn’t go with that approach as there is no soldering used on this circuit board […]

Citroen DS Instrument Cluster Lighting

Recently during a night drive I discovered my Citroen DS instrument cluster lighting had failed. In Sydney, where I live, this is a huge problem as the city is bristling with speed cameras. So many that I could lose my entire licence in about 10 minutes driving near my house doing only 10 km/h over the speed limit. I regularly drive at night, so I needed to find a solution.

My first assumption was the rheostat had failed. The rheostat is the dimmer that lets the driver control the brightness of the instrument cluster lights. Over time, these can develop […]

Citroen DS radio upgrade almost complete

The Radio upgrade on the Citroen DS is almost complete. It’s taken over a month (albeit only a few hours a week). Today I properly installed the speakers. The DS front speaker is a 3″x7″ size which is not very common. Der Franzose carry a drop in replacement, but it is an original paper style speaker and I wanted to go with something more modern. Retrosound offer a low profile 3.5″ speaker, so I went with two of them and used a custom bracket to mount them under the factory grill. For the rears, I went with the retrosound 6.5″ […]

Citroen DS radio/instrument cluster update

This evening I was able to make good progress on the DS. First, I was able to fix a few of the issues with the instrument cluster, where the illumination wasn’t working for the gauges and the light for the heated rear window wasn’t working. (The heated rear window doesn’t work, but at least the light does!)

I also spent a bit more time on the radio. Instead of messing with the ignition switch, which has already been replaced with an aftermarket unit on my car, I wired the radio to the accessory point behind the dash. The accessory point […]

DS Instrument Cluster

The instrument cluster of my Citroen DS needed to be removed to fit the new Retrosound Model Two radio I had purchased for the car. While it was out, I had a few things I wanted to address:

My temperature gauge was disconnected The silver circles around the gauges were peeling off There was minimal speedometer illumination, a problem in our world full of speed cameras I wanted to move from MPH to KPH One of the corners of the housing was broken off due to the screws being tightened too much

Since the instrument cluster was not original (the […]