i recently bought a 95 firebird and the guy i bought it from installed a seperate temp gauge, he told me that the temperature gauge in the dash didnt work. he has his wire running into the heads with a spring around it, the green wire beside it in the picture is what i would think is the original wire for gauge in insturment panel. would anyone be able to tell me how to go about hooking up the original and doing away with the seperate gauge....

 

Well you need a new sensor as the one that's in there now appears to be for a mechanical gauge and the factory gauge is electric.

 

ok well i have connected a new senor to the end of my green wire and put it in boiling water and turned the car over to see if i got a reading, there was no reading but i did put it in anyhow. would you happen to know what i should do from there?

 

Well i havnt worked on a 4th gen really but assumeing that the coolent temp guage works like a typical GM coolent temp guage nothing exotic the way it works is an electrical game of tug of war with the coolent sensor creating in imbalance. Unfortunetly this also mean the next logical place to start testing is the dash itself which again not sure how bad they are to take apart. Once apart you will want to make sure you have 12V to the guage and a good ground. Also if you measure the third terminal you should see the resistance of the sensor itself. If any of thoes conditions are not true its a wireing problem if everything checks out you have a bad gauge or the connection beween the guage and the dash is bad. One final note when you start the car all the electrical guages usually go through some self test where thell go to the max value and then return to the correct reading does the coolent guage do that?

 

i just went out and checked that and it doesnt move at all

 

Well then I'd definitely check the terminals at the gauge for +12v and ground but sounds like you might need a new gauge.

 

ok thanks! would the gauge be something that you could buy by it self?

 

If that green wire goes to the dash gauge, then you should be able to jumper a wire from the connector on the green wire to ground. This should make the gauge move. If it moves, it's probably good. Boiling that sensor won't give you a reading without a ground connection which is formed when you screw it into the engine.

 

Well you can buy that guage by itself but usually you just pick up the entire instrument cluster from a junk yard or whereever instead of just the individual guages. Now if you wanted to order a new one through say your local dealer then you would buy just that particular guage.