(First of all, sorry for the double post. I ran this in electrical, but then realized it would be better suited here. If a mod wants to kill the other one, feel free!)

Hi all!
I have an '87 with the 2.8 V6. it came with the basic gauage cluster including the 85 mph speedo and the big clock, no tach and idiot lights instead of gauages for water temp, oil pressure and volts.
I understand that the gauge swap are a relatively plug and play type set and I have one from an '86 that should just drop right in.
My question is in swapping over from the idiot lights to the gauges, I assume I will have to swap out some of the sensors/sending units on the engine to get the gauages to work. My local Autozone dude told me that they spec out a gauge or light part for these years. Which parts need to be replaced to make everything work? I asked him about the swap and he asked if want sensors or sendors
What do I need?

 

nothing at all?

TTT

 

sorry. You'll need senders for your new gauges. I'm assuming your 87 is a camaro? Just go to your auto parts store and get the stock gauge senders to go with your (new) cluster. You only need senders for the oil pressure and the temp, the volts will run right off of one of your ignition wires.

 

thank you very much the advice!!!

i will be picking up the sendors tomorrow and will post how everything goes!

 

When I did my swap, I didn't change the senders. Everything seems to work fine, unless they are just inaccurate

 

I am pretty sure that when you are going from dummy lights to gauges you need the gauge senders. I believe that they use sensors for the dummy lights, so for instance when water temp gets too hot the sensor tracks that and iluminates the dash light.

 

True, but why would the sending unit's output be any different? Shouldn't the gauge cluster just interpret the input differently? Dummy lights get brighter the higher the temperature gets which means they are receiving a variable feed from the sending unit. I think the normal guages just use the impulses that would normally light up the dummy lights to move the needle up and down.

I have no expertise in this field, just what I have experienced with the different gauges so I could definitely be wrong.

 

well you had me wondering if I was giving out bad advice so I did a little searching and from what I've seen you do need to upgrade from the dummy light sensors for actual gauge senders.

https://www.thirdgen.org/forums/inte...e-cluster.html

This is a tech article about this very swap and it says to replace with guge senders.

https://www.thirdgen.org/gauges

I don't have any experience with dumy lights either I had just heard before that you need to replace the sensors for gauge senders

 

I also read that tech article after I did my swap. I was surprised to see the part about changing sending units. I wounder if anyone has ever really tried not swapping the sending units when they swap gauges. Could just be an assumption.

Now that I think about it, my cars engine was swapped with an IROC engine which would not have dummy lights in it. The sending units were probably not dummy light type to begin with. That could be why my swap worked, but the dummy lights also worked before the swap. Kinda confusing

 

as I understand dummy lights to work they only come on when something is becoming critical. so for instance when your fans aren't working and your car heats up to over 230 degrees the dummy light would come on. Which would make sense that your lights would gradually get brighter while using gauge senders.

 

That must be it then. It just worked for me because I already had the correct senders