BeerBurner

My water temperature gauge likes to dance around about 1-2 mm. It's not constant but definately common enough and I'm pretty certain it's just a bad ground somewhere that needs to be cleaned.

That said, where should I look? I know I can clean up the plug for the sender (which if I read correctly is the one behind the blue sendor under the j-boot) but where else can I look? I wasn't really able to find anything else in my search.

Thanks,
BB.

whalebird

Does it 'dance' when you engage other stuff like the lights, wipers, windows, etc?

BeerBurner

It just does it on its own. It may do it with other accessories as well but I haven't really paid attention to that.

BB.

MAGK944

The water temp signal actually grounds through the sensor to the engine block. Most common cause of a "dancing" pointer is the connection to the sensor. If you other gauges also "dance" look at the instrument panel grounds under the dash, LH & RH inner fender. If it's neither of these things causing the problem it's likely you guage pointer/needle damper spring is weak, no repair just swap out the guage.

arthropraxis

My gas gauge was doing that. I took the instrument panel off and the connector on the back was not on all the way. Has it always done this or is it a new issue? Have you had the instrument panel out recently?

BeerBurner

It's been doing this for at least five years but it seems to have gotten a bit worse recently (or maybe I'm just paying more attention to it?). The cluster has been out a couple of times since it has been doing this.

I'll go ahead and clean things up at the sensor and, if that doesn't work, I'll pull the cluster and check all of the connections. If it's still doing it after that I may just continue to ignore it.

BB.

arthropraxis

If you want to stand on your head you can see/feel that connector from under the dash.

BeerBurner

I should probably do that before the beer!

BB.