BTW what part of the country do you live in?

 

I'm in Illinois, about 45 minutes NE of St. Louis.

I see you're in Austin... I was there last October for a conference. I didn't want to leave.

 

yea because it was in october not august. LOL. I was born in Alton if you know where that is. Did you try to get ahold of Z? he is very knowledgable. And I would check around for jk yards up there.

 

Very familiar with Alton, I have a few friends that live there. I'm about 40 minutes down the road from there. I have a few junk yards that I'm going to try to call. What should I ask them specifically?

As for Austin in August, it wasn't much better here this year. I think from June until the end of July, it dropped below 90 once or twice, and had several days in a row above 100... WITH our nasty humidity. At least it's not Mississippi!

 

PCMs are pretty specific, year , engine, and tranny, if you find a truck , its a roll of the dice with the computer. but you could get all the wires from one first. depends on what they want for the pcm. rebuilt ones are about 250 online. but get the wires fixed first and see what happens. dont forget the grounds. I like to pull my own parts at the yard because I always find something else I wasnt thinking of to get. Never leave a JY empty handed!

 

I was discussing all this with my wife when I realized something that had happened shortly after the cluster stopped working...

When I would start the engine, all the lights at the bottom of the panel turned ON except the ABS light. Then, about 10-15 seconds later, I'd hear a "click", the ABS light would kick on and the engine would die.

I pulled the negative terminal and drained the system, put the negative terminal back on and started it, and everything ran fine. A few days later, same thing happened. Those were the only two times this had happened until last week when I removed the instrument cluster, but then, it only happened once.

I've checked all my fuses and they are in good shape.

 

More chewed wires? what happens when you pull the ABS fuse? But you probably thought of that.

 

I haven't tried... Should I pull it while it's running, or is that a big no-no? Also, is there a good "diagram" for my engine? There's a bunch of hoses and wires that are in my way, so I need to try to take them off, but I'm not quite sure what they all are... ha

 

find the abs fuse in the fuse box, pull it. yea i wouldnt while its running, but i always try to be cautous with these crazy computer trucks, pull the negative battery everytime.

 

Ok, my wires/connector are finally in (made the mistake of paying with paypal and it took a week to transfer funds from my bank). I'm having a problem getting the main wire group to come off the engine. It looks like the cluster is attached to 2 tabs just above the valve cover on the driver side. Is there any trick to this, or is brute force the best method?

Also, are there instructions on how to assemble the connector?