Im not sure what exactly it is called however I have a 87 trans am with the digital dash and im slowly working on finishing assembly of the car. I bought the car with no engine, tranny, engine harness, or computer. So I assembled the harness and have power temporarily going to the dash. Everything lights up and works except the screen with the odometer, trip, and such. The screen lights up and sometimes you can see partial numbers, if you look at it from the side you can read the odometer partially, which reads 80,000 miles. however its not working correctly, how can I go about fixing it, or is it fixable. I have a complete dash out of my donor 87 that has 61,000 miles on it should I just switch it out or fix this screen

 

When I was messing with this stuff I noticed that sometimes a good display seems to show a "ghost" image when the backlighting is not working. The display "worked",... but didn't really 'show-up' because the display didn't have any backlighting. The backlight bulb for that section of the display is supposed to be a $11 bulb similar to the one used in third brake lights,.... not a cheapo 194.

Backlighting problems are almost commonly a dead light bulb. If the bulb is new ( and socket is clean ) the next reason for backlighting failure is a failed printed circuit. If you look close at the back of the cluster you might find a melted ( AKA 'cooked' ) circuit and/or the printed circuit might be "separating".

I've also found that the circuit board that controls the Odometer readout seems to fail more than any other part of the cluster - at least in my experience ! This dead board has caused no response from the display at all, and caused the display to work for just a few seconds,.. before going dead.

 

I had the same issue, picked up a 2nd working digital dash and swapped out the modules. Works great now.

 

is there any place that rebuilds the boards for these if it is bad or do i need to try and find a new one