okay so heres the history of the vehicle. its a 1988 Base Camaro. it came stock with a 305 tbi and a 700r4. when i bought it (december) the guy swapped in the 350 tbi. when i took it home the engine was a mess. he just kinda threw it all together without worrying about wire lengths and everything. it ran fine and everything worked great except the cluster. i went ahead and shorted all the wires up to et it to look cleaner. theres a bunch of wires under the hood that are just dangling there not connected into anything. but anyway, when i got the car the speedo didnt work. the guy changed the speedo cable and it still didnt work, so he just said screw it. the stock cluster came with a 115 mph btw. the tach is wayyyy off. it reads 7500 rpm when i just touch the gas. so i decided to buy a new cluster. i bought a 145 cluster out of an 87. it should just hook right up right? and if im not mistaken the speedo is ONLY cable driven. i read somewhere i might have to change sending units. how many are there and where are they located? what if this cluster doesnt work? you think maybe one of those wires dangling around is the reason? btw the gas temp and volts work fine. im going to put the cluster in tomorrow so i REALLY need somebody to explain everything to me. im not a rookie when it comes around working on cars but im def a newbie when it comes to gauges and wiring **** up.

basically just wanna know the full story bout the sending units, and what other extremely important things i need to know. thank you!!!!

 

When it comes to your speedo,........ Crawl under the car and check to be sure the speedo cable is conencted to the tranny. It's possible that the cable was not reconnected when the engine swap was performed. ( there are no wires involved at all for the speedo to operate. )

When it comes to your tach,..... Look at the oil pressure guage and see what it reads. If it says 40/80 than it was a V6 Tachometer. If your car has a V8 than it will need a tachometer with a 30/60 oil pressure gauge.

When swapping a V8 cable cluster for another V8 cable cluster - you do not have to change the TEMP or the OIL pressure sending unit you already have.

 

okay so basically all i need to do unhook the cluster thats in it and hook the new one up and it should work right? or am i just dreaming lol. and im picking the cluster up tongiht around 10 so we'll see what the oil pressure gauge says. and the one thats in it now says 30/60. is there anything else im gonna need to do besides hook it up in the dash? anything under the hood? i just wanna be able to go out there tomorrow with confidence in what im doing. thanks for all the help btw.

 

Right.

I can't say that your Tach and/Or Speedo problem will start working - but in your case you should not have to do anything other than a direct swap of the clusters.

P.S. (The white? TACH wire comes off the distributor...... One distributor terminal says BAT and one says TACH )

 

alright. ill do the swap tomorrow and tell you how it works out! thanks for all the help John.

 

alright, so i did the cluster swap this morning. only took a half an hour. i took it for a test drive and all the gauges worked correctly. the tach read as it should for the first time since ive had the car. but the speedometer still didnt even move. so like John suggested i went under the car to find out that speedo cable was melted away and all that was left was the metal insides. soooo i went to old ebay and bought me a new one for 30 bucks. we'll see if this does the trick!

 

SWEET !

There's nothing like having a full set of functional instruments in front of you when your drivin' ! It sounds like your well on your way in terms of fixing up your new toy !!!