hey guys,

so my girlfriend has a 96 neon and ive read that its common for the gauges to fail. what is happening with hers is that occasionally while driving around the city (start/stop driving) the gauges will all stop working. Then if you pound on the dash a couple of times, they often (but not always) work again for a while. sometimes no amount of pounding gets them working again until we leave the car and come back hours later. she tells me that they dont fail when she is on the highway (although i dont know how that would affect things).

my big concern is: we are driving from wisconsin to west virginia in her neon (something like 1400 round trip) and i dont want this to be a problem along the way. what can i do about this? does something have to be replaced? is there an easy fix? would resoldering the circuit board of the cluster do anything (as suggested in one of the faqs above)?

we are leaving in only a couple of days so that is why i felt the need to post and ask specifically....i read some posts but i really want to get straight advice from someone here on this sitation.

any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

yes this is a common problem and very fixable, you have two options:
Option A: Re solder the points known to cause these problems:https://dodgeforum.com/m_179505/tm.htm or option B by a new or used cluster and slap her in, very easy to do and they are plug in play, to save some money you should try a junk yard first, if that's not an option or the yard(s) doesn't have one available you could buy one from your local part store both options are very easy and are not time comsuming at all. an actual third option would be ordering one off line but your pressed for time unless you went with rush delivery, good luck !!