Tacho Sometimes Doesnt Move

[Neo4]

Hi

I have a 1996 R33 GTST with intercooler. Sometimes when I start the car, the tacho doesnt move at all. Until I stop and start the car later, the tacho meter is stationary at 0. This doesnt happen always. Any Ideas?

[RBFIRE]

wow, same problem like mine,

i believe its a bad connection somewhere, in my case, its the driver side window switch, when i wind all the way down, i hear this clicking noise,

1 time, when my tacho froze when i was doing 60km/h, i hit the dash gauge cover, and it start moving again. and it working fine since!!!

[SoFly]

same problem and my revs tend to lag too.

[joh21m]

mine lags also! but i have an rb20 in my sil.

anyone know how to fix this???

[Packy]

I've got a 94 gts25t, and yes this is a common problem.

In the gauge cluster there is a loose link for the tacho signal. As I've had this problem for years now, even when the car was standard. My easy solution is to look at your avcr/revspeed meter or you aftermarket ecu display. We found the problem in the cluster itself, just haven't bothered to fix it.

Other things getting rpm signals from the ecu always work, even when your tacho doesn't. And yes a hit to the dash sometimes helps.

[JimX]

Thought I'd do a quick search on this before writing up my post, and it seems to be a more common problem than I thought! I had a similar problem, tacho often not working until the car warmed up, sometimes working fine anytime, and sometimes not at all. But more recently it's been working less and less so I pulled the instruments out to take a look (about my third time actually).

What I found is the metal tag on the black loom plug that goes into the tacho (the lower one on the side with 2 plugs on it, the right side as you look forwards) was sitting a bit lower than the other 2 on either side of it. Since this plugs into a socket which has a stiff plastic sheet for holding the connectors, I imagine that the 2 higher tags were lifting the sheet up and out of the way to make the contact with the tacho signal wire dodgy at best, and depending on how the car flexes and moves as you drive, possibly breaking all contact.

I used a pair of jeweler's screwdrivers on either side to gently lift up the metal tag so that it was flush with the other 2, if not a fraction of a millimetre higher. I figure that even if pressed up slightly in the middle by a single tag, the plastic sheet would still bend down easier to make contact with the 2 tags on the outside.

I am not 100% sure that this has fixed it, for all I know there could be a dry joint or something in the tacho itself causing this and this was just a coincidence that it's started working again. But I'm fairly confident that this has fixed it and it won't cost you anything other than a bit of your time to work on the instrument cluster to at least check this first. Definitely worth a shot before sending the dash to a repair workshop or buying another dash, if only to rule it out as a possible cause.

I am going to write this up in the general maintenance and DIY forum as well, because I've seen a few people with this problem and I imagine it may not only apply to Skylines but any car with a similar plastic sheet contact setup that the Skyline dash has.