Rather than search and wait to find a broken cluster to salvage the sockets from, I took another look at the cluster plugs. They are a standard 0.1" or 2.54 mm spacing. I went down to my local electronics store and picked up some header pins and set to work.




I've now traced each pin for the cluster swap (I think) and soldered each wire to it's corresponding pin. I'm not real happy with how the heat shrink turned out, so I might revisit that later. The additional wires are ones that will get transferred to the green plug. Here is the beginning of my adapter harness. It will plug into my existing harness so no modification of the existing cluster plugs will be necessary.

 

Finished up my prototype cluster harness tonight. Of course I had to go plug it all in. No gray plug yet, but the cluster has all of the basic functions. The best part was the surprise of the "light saber" gauge needles. I need to finish mapping out the pins to the gray plug and test that before finishing my final harness. I may put in an order for one of the ebay LCD screens.

 

Looks good. I was skeptical when i put in an eBay LCD at 93,000 miles. Its now 107,000 miles later and its perfect.

 

How bad was it to replace the LCD? I've seen some DIYs that make it look easy and others that make it look terrible.

 

Bad. Don't tell anyone, but the first one I bought from eBay I tried to solder. Screwed it all up. Bought a second one from eBay and found a kid on Craigs List who repairs circuit boards for a living. He got it pretty easily, but he said the foil solder pads were pretty cheap and fragile. He said it's "all about dwell time and temperature" when you're soldering crappy little foil pads.

I do not have the solder skills for this stuff.

 

Just what I wanted to hear... For now I just want to get everything functional. I'll deal with the LCD later.

 

Full facelift cluster swap complete! The ECU now sees the VSS from the cluster and the full rpm range is available for usage . I still have the warning lights to deal with on the new cluster, but I think I can just ground them to get rid of them for now.

The cluster swap wasn't as bad as others had made it out to be, or maybe I'm just getting used to reading these diagrams. Regardless, I'd be happy to send my spreadsheet to anyone interested in this swap. I'll try to make it into a nice .pdf at some point for others to reference.

 

Nice job! I wouldn't have tackled that.



I'll never get used to reading those Audi wiring diagrams.

 

Nice, I always thought the cluster swap wouldn't be too difficult, you just need to know how to read the diagrams. After my me7.5 swap it's become second nature. Could you send the spreadsheet my way? Just wanna make sure I got it all right on mine since I made it without even looking at my wiring or the new cluster.

 

I'd be happy to. Just PM me your email address and I'll send it off.

Got the cruise control issue figured out. I plugged in the wrong terminals for the clutch switch while I was cleaning up some of the wiring under the dash. My wife was very annoyed that I chose to use the cruise for every road on a short trip to Home Depot. It turns out that it will activate at least as low as 30mph. I also made sure that using the clutch now cancels the cruise rather than testing my rev-limiter.