i have no one to blame but myself. i'm just hoping there may be a not too expensive fix. my car has an intermittant miss and after spending much money replacing leads, plugs, coils etc i decided to check the codes. i had it done at a ford dealer when on holiday in march at sunshine coast and it came up clear but i didn't trust the operator as they did not even clear codes and roadtest. anyway whilst doing this one of the small aligator clips i was using on the pins slipped sideways a bit without me knowing and rested on the pin next to it resulting in smoke and a melted pin by the time i noticed. i started the car and took it for a drive and everything seemed o.k so i breathed a big sigh of relief however.... driving home tuesday my tacho gave a few surges of the needle then died. that afternoon i pulled my dash apart and cluster out and could see no sign of any melted wiring or any evidence of the previos days mishap. i put it all back together only to find that now my oil light and coolant light(not the low coolant one but one on guage) remain on at all times. both oil pressure guage and temp guage both work fine still. do i have a bung cluster, a wiring problem or dud ecu or all of the above.

also if i end up changing cluster can i get the chip from mine for odo etc put into new one ??

thanks in advance for any help.

the EPROM chip holds the kms, so yes you can transfer the km's if you need to swap clusters

Yes you can get the KM reading changed over, easy job for any TV reapir shop, those sorta places.

Sounds like you fried something in the elctrical circuit board somehow, and its blown the circuit for the tacho.

I got a cluster out of my FUtura you have get shows 234k km.

i don't think futura has oil pressure or voltage meter. hopefully it is just a fried cluster. my odo is on 280k but i would still like to keep those k's as the motor is still in great shape and shows what they can do when well maintained and looked after.

any ideas on lights staying on? only happened after pulling cluster out and putting back in so maybe theres a bad contact in one of the connectors.

futura doesn't. any mid-series cluster is what you need - i.e. XR/Fairmont/Ghia