hey guysi just received my white faced gauges and went directly to work on em lol, BUT for some reason when i plugged the new cluster in, once i would turn the key, everything would turn off. i disconnected and reconnected countless times and the same thing happened each time, i took the new one outand put back my old one and everthing works fine. anyone know what the problem could be?

Here's a quick rundown of what i did:
unplugged neg. battery term
removed all screws neccessary to take cluster out
took old cluster out, plugged new one in
reconnected battery(at this point the miles and door symbol light up)
turned key to on position and everthing shut off

everytime i disconnected and reconnected the new cluster i disconnected the neg. battery terminal, and had same results,
gave up and decided to try again tomorrow, when i connected my old cluster, everthing worked fine on the very first try

 

what color is your key?

 

grey....

 

bump...

 

come on guys lol

 

When you say "everything" turns off, do you mean ALL the interior electronics, or just the new guae cluster itself?

 

when i tried to crank the car everything including the dome light shut off.....is it because i have one of those "special" keys? I went back out to try it again and same thing, i did notice that on my old cluster, when i turned the key to the on position, the red full circle, i believe its the sentry light, turned on, blinked, then went away, then the car started up fine. with the new cluster, the sentry light kept blinking and never went away, im assuming this is the problem, but i know many people have done the swap, what would i need to do to get it to work? im still outside tryin to get it to work so your help is appreciated lol

 

Well, its definitely a sentry key problem...

 

so what if anything can be done?

 

Well, usually when people do the cluster swap they get clusters that were standard with sentry, so the sentry light is always on because they do not have sentry, in which case, they remove the bulb...no problems. In your case, you have sentry, and the new cluster had sentry, and the cluster sentry "signal" isnt the same as your stock sentry...and for whatever reason the cluster is triggering your sentry system, even though the sentry key module in your key, the ignition, and the PCM match.