I know this subject has been covered for many years now, and there are plenty of helpful hints on this forum.
I'm about to "possibly" partake in the swap adventure, and have seen a few different installs ( the ones that actually still have a valid picture link ). There are a few users here that have done it, but like I previously stated, their pictures of the install, and what needs to be cut, removed or shaven are gone... and maybe even the user is gone as well. There are also quite a few posts that end with "I'll post pics of the completed install, etc... later " and never did. Anyway, I pretty much have in mind the wiring, again thanks to ig88vsbobafett for spelling it out in a post. There are still a couple of things are still amiss with me..
One is, I've come across some posts about a Speedometer Buffer, 2000/4000ppm issue, and the speedometer wont work without one, do I need this? I have a 85 GT, Auto, with an 87 tach & speedo swap. If I do need this buffer, does anyone reading this have a working spare they could possible sell? Or where to look?
Second, has anyone that did this swap use the original faceplate of the Cavalier cluster, and make it look nice inside the fiero pod? I've seen some using a piece of smoked Plexiglass which looks real nice, however they don't have the original faceplate behind it; which is what I want.
Also if there are any users that have done this, didn't like it, and decided to go back to the original cluster I would like to hear from you as well..
I would rather have all my ducks in a line before starting the swap. Thanks in advance for any helpful tips.
[This message has been edited by triads (edited 03-11-2015).]
Thanks for the reply, but that search has already been done. It just seems that anyone that has done this swap or added the buffer has sold their car and don't have any recollection of the wiring.
[This message has been edited by triads (edited 03-13-2015).]
You're gonna want to upgrade to bright LED's if you want to go with smoked glass. a couple of nuts and the cover comes off the tach mechanism
Make your life easy and label all the plug terminals. You'll hate yourself later if you don't.
Here is you typical Walmart automotive lighting improvement LED strip. Normally meant for import "tuner" wanna be's. Use your dremel and cut some fiberglass circuit board with metal foil on one side into an adapter for the poor stock bulbs.
Grind out the middle section to make two separate contact areas to solder your wires onto so you can plug it into the stock bulb receptical. Remember, LED's are polarity sensitive and won't work one way. Check before plugging in and buttoning up your dash.
Like so...
Now crush this thing. But wear proper PPE.
In case you were wondering which one is positive and which one is negative.
I cut the lens from the cavalier tach gauge cluster to use as a mounting place for the LEDs
Don't mount them like this. Mount the LEDs in the hockey stick shape of the tach display. You'll get better visibility. For those of you who don't know what hockey is... Google it.
I used ca glue and activator to hold things in place
Ta-Da!
Trim off the outer flap
You'll need to trim off the area inside the line to clear the steering column
Back view for some reason
I think it's trimmed here
Marked are the other areas you will have to trim. Note the line at the top as well
Use some extra material to make a coulple of spacer tabs.
Should now look something like this. Now those tabs go around the two screw holes at the bottom. I used CA glue and activator again
Here you can see why they are shaped the way they are
A couple of stock screw with washers to hold things in place
A closer look.
But of course you want to know how to modify the fiero cluster housing to make things fit. I got pics for that too if you want me to continue....
Definitely keep up the good work. I'd love to see a video of this installed and working. For being an 80's car, most people that see this would probably just assume the fiero came stock like this.
------------------ Every fiero has a story, It's our job to keep that story alive.
I believe the digital dash was available in the Cavalier from 87-89. Possibly 90. I'm not 100% for sure but those are the years I have pulled them from. Always from the 2door fastback version. I think I even found one in a Sunbird hatchback... weird kinda looking model. I have pulled as many bad clusters as I have good clusters and found that for the most part, the later years are the better ones that always work. They weren't used for very long because of problems... or so I've heard.
You WANT two of these. These are the connectors that plug into the back of the fiero cluster. They have those great hook thingys that grab onto the cluster and don't slip out. The Cavalier comes with ones that just press in and are held in by the gauge cluster being screwed in place, whereas the fiero by design needs them to be held in place with those clips. Not the end of the world if you can't get them but you at least have one with the fiero gauge cluster. The other plug for the fiero is too small to work with the Cavalier pod. So grab the plugs with the Cavalier pod as you will need at least one and the one from your fiero. It's nice to have the pig tail wire ends in some cases where the fiero wire needs to be extended.
As for what needs to be done to the fiero pod to make the Cavalier cluster fit? Grab a Dremel and do this....
And this...
Now we are going to play with this thing. The metal piece that was screwed onto the top of the Cavalier cluster attaching it to the grey face thing.
Do this to it.
Now to fill this spot with one of the pieces and make it hold the Cavalier cluster in place.
This piece goes here... some pilot holes and leftover screws will hold it in place.
And the other side.
Make sure not to drill into the circuit boards. The white plastic is kinda funny stuff. It doesn't burn with heat the way most plastic does but melts kinda grainy. It does however crack easily if you don't drill the darn pilot holes! So don't cut corners in that area.
Notice the metal pieces from the front in the top two corners of the fiero pod. Poorly circled is a stubby sheetmetal screw I used to further anchor the Cavalier cluster into the fiero pod.
A closer look
Making some cardboard templates, I used that extra Cavalier cluster flap I cut off and fabbed up some filler pieces. I put them on white paper so they could be seen easier.
With the 1\8" holes drilled, a couple of pop rivits ineach piece holds them tight.
Now you can pull out the whole cavalier pod and it looks like this...
You can see in this picture that the sections between the display on the right have been made larger as has the area above the speedo. This is because with the difference between the angle of the cavalier gauge cluster to the driver and the angle of the fiero gauge cluster to the driver, the stock cavalier instrument cover actually prevents a portion of the display from being seen. In another Cavalier digital dash swap I did, I just cut out the bars between all the displays on the right side. Much easier!
You can kinda see what I mean in this pic. The flash really drowned out the display!
Ok. I'm into this for over a half hour and got a few things to do this evening. More tomorrow. If you want...
------------------ "Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne." - Kurt Vonnegut
Well, somehow my SD card with all my pics is corrupted. Whatever that means. 8gigs of videos, pics and info gone. Sh*t.
I'll try to finish up with what I can.
The white plastic part of the Cavalier dash that holds all the gauges needs to be trimmed down the sides to fit in the fiero pod. To prevent the light from escaping the sides, I used the trimmed pieces to melt back on after the right size has been achieved.
There is no battery light in the Cavalier dash. Not a problem as there is a good voltage display and I had no problems when running the 2.5 4cyl. The Caddy 4.9 needs a battery warning light as the computer uses the resistance across the bulb to tell the alternator to start charging the battery. I spliced a battery backlit display into one of the cavalier pod blank warning display lights. You kinda got to figure which one to use given the tracings on the back of the cluster. Some glue and tape and a bunch of time later it was working. Sorry. No pics
There is a shift light on the Cavalier dash and can be wired into the fiero computer. At least the 2.5 computer. It's great if you want the car to tell you to shift at all the wrong times and to randomly flash. I pulled the bulb and threw it away.
My Speedo is wired directly to the terminals on the back of the Cavalier dash. Worked great with the 2.5. No buffer needed. I had the Caddy ECM chip reprogrammed to recognize the fiero's gauge required pulses ( I believe it is 4000 ) and it works fine. No buffer needed. Of course the Caddy ECM needed to see the speed of the car for other reasons and I wired it in parallel to the speedo. Seems to work fine. What would the buffer be used for any how?
The needle on the Tach is not really visible during the daylight and needs a brighter bulb than the stock ones. I have yet to make a custom LED to take it's place but it is on the "to do" list. Of course this is because I put a one piece smoked lens across the whole fiero pod face. If you come up with an alternative, you won't have this as a problem. But personally, it just looks so cool with the smoked glass that I plan on finding a solution.
The 2.5 caused the Tach to read low, and the 4.9 causes the tach to read higher RPM than it is. It is calibrated for a 6 cylinder so providing that is what you have, you should not need to alter the back of the tach board.
I'll take some more pics. But I can't tell you how pissed I am to have lost damn near all of them.
That stinks.. Hopefully you'll be able to resurrect your Mem card... Right now im trying to bench test this cav dash I have before I install it. I know I have + & - to hook up, but is there anything else that needs to be powered? Like the dimming line, does it need juice?
Just put 12 volts to the + & - on the back of the pod. I used an emergency lighting battery pack. (The two large ribbon contacts) the instruments should power up. The electronics convert the 12 volts to around 50 in order to light up the display. It does a test run of the displays by lighting it up like in that video that was posted, then it returns to the input values. You won't see any movement on the tach till you hook things up. Thats how I found out one of mine were bad. (I have 2 tested and working spare cavalier clusters). The dimming works funny and won't work properly if you wire things up the way it says to in the wiring thread here on pff. I will post my wiring sheets with corrected notes when I find them.
Wow, I have never seen someone step up so BIG when someone else asked for help! Kudos to you! I sold a cavalier Digital Dash on eBay about 6 months ago. If I had had the step by step that you posted here, I probably would have been able to install it!
I am a computer tech, and if you would like, send me the SD card, and I will do everything possible to retrieve the data. As long as there is nothing personal on it of course I will then toss the files up on the net for you to download, and mail the card back to you. I do not want any money for this, just hopefully the ability to help retrieve the rest of the pictures for the cluster install is payment enough.
Hey JohnWBP, thank you so much for the offer to look at \ repair my SD card. I do have a computer programmer friend who will look at it on the weekend. If he can't figure anything out I'll take you up on that offer!
I did some digging and took some fresh pics with a new SD card for ya.
Here is a picture of the back of one of my spare Cavalier digital dashes. I have the plug installed into only one of the two ports... this one. All of the wires are taped up and isolated from each other and the black wire (-) and pink with black stripe wire (+) are set aside for 12 V power.
With the cluster flipped over and the two wires sticking out the right side... power is eagerly waiting
ALL I did was connect the 12 V battery (2000mAh) to the two wires, black - and pink\black + and she fired right up. Here is its system check mode at its peak
And when it is done it drops down to this and stays here waiting for you to re-attach the car, start your cavalier and drive away.
Like that will ever happen. The poor Cavalier digital dash must feel like Robocop when he realized the rest of his body was scrapped and this is all that was kept.
I would bring a battery into the yard and test the cluster after I pulled it so I didn't buy a dud. After being burned the first time that is. I do have two spares and am willing to part with the one in the picture if you are interested. I can also make you a smoked lens as I have enough plexi left for a couple. PM me and we can go from there. If not, I'll finish answering all the questions and posting pics (when\if I get them recovered)
As a side note; all of the white print on the Cavalier grey face is backlit and shows up through the smoked lens when the lights are on. I thought that was pretty neat.
I know they are getting very hard to find, but has anyone tried a Cimarron dash.
The Cimarron dash. Compliments of google images.0
My personal favorite. The Riviera digital dash. I have a working one but supposedly need the matching ECM and BCM piggy backed to communicate. Just not that inspired right now.
[This message has been edited by Reallybig (edited 03-19-2015).]
Hopefully your friend can get the images off the card for you.
This thread reminded me that I still had a GM temperature sensor for the cavalier cluster. I just put it up on eBay. I have been tossing a couple items on eBay to have some extra pocket money to blow at the Daytona show next weekend
Hopefully your friend can get the images off the card for you.
This thread reminded me that I still had a GM temperature sensor for the cavalier cluster. I just put it up on eBay. I have been tossing a couple items on eBay to have some extra pocket money to blow at the Daytona show next weekend
I would have bought that outright from you, w/o ebay
Ok Triads, a few spare minutes and some quick pics for ya. Not much different from all the other pics but worth a look. When it's done, I'll plug it into my car to test things out and make sure it's working.
the working cluster
before modifying to fit the new dash
Left side
Right side
The sides of the cavalier cluster need trimming to fit the fiero pod
more trimming required
Making the smoked lens. I just copied mine onto the extra plexi I have at home and spent a bunch of time trimming and sanding
rough cut
all cleaned up and ready to use. I'm leaving the paper covering on to protect from scratches.
on the back of mine I put a border of electrical tape to help cut down on the light produced from the gauges that would otherwise show through the cracks.
punching holes in small sheet metal pieces is much easier than trying to drill.
Well, there's more done, just not captured on film yet. The cavalier dash is in the fiero pod and I am just working on the alignment and secure anchoring along with other details i forgot about that take a crap load of time. I plan on having it buttoned up and tested tomorrow evening... but the best laid plans of mice and men...
Some good progress today on the plug-n-play cavalier\fiero gauge pod for triads. Fully mounted and almost ready for testing. It doesn't look like it but this is a long process. I don't remember it taking this long for the other two I built. But I do have a bad memory so.... Just a few small details and I'll plug it into my fiero and make sure it all works before shipping.
I want to try to improve on a few of the features with this gauge pod that I do feel could use some attention. So I picked up some custom (walmart) LED lights for $17 to replace a few in the dash that don't show up so bright behind the smoked lens.
Of course you could also read "custom" as "will need modification". One bulb needed to be taller and one needed to be shorter. The tall one was spaced with some black silicone for assembly and strength reasons.
The short one will fit under the tach to illuminate the needle and the backlit words.
The tall one will illuminate the backlit images on the gauge face plate as well as other stuff
This should make for an improvement over the dim stock lightbulbs. I hope.
[This message has been edited by Reallybig (edited 04-07-2015).]
I will then toss the files up on the net for you to download, and mail the card back to you. I do not want any money for this, just hopefully the ability to help retrieve the rest of the pictures for the cluster install is payment enough.
