Hello,
This is my first post on the Fiat Forum - although I'm a frequent spectator and very appreciative of the help I have obtained in the last few years from you guys for my 2003 Stilo 1.2.
Like a lot of others have posted here, I too have a Fiat Stilo with a faulty instrument cluster.
The cluster instruments are dead except that the LCD screen glows orange.
I have checked the fuses F37 and F53 but with no success, so I removed the cluster (thank you so much to the previous posters for the guide on how to do this !).
I removed the cluser from it's plastic housing and then reconnected it to the D connector on the wiring loom so it's getting power.
The LCD screen still glows orange as before but I have noticed that if I move the large capacitor on the back of the board (220 microfarad circled in the photo) some lights on the cluster (such as the green headlight symbol) illuminate temporarily.
This leads me to suspect that there is a bad solder joint somewhere in the region of that capacitor on the board.
My problem is that to get at the soldered side of the board I need to remove black faceplate and the needles from the gauges.
Does anyone know if there is a safe enough way to do this without destroying the instruments ?
Or is attempting this myself a recipe for disaster ?

Many Thanks.
Enda

The four white "hook" tabs (about a quarter of the way in from each short end) hold the board in place but you will probably have to remove the needles from the instruments first, since their spindles will come out with the board. The needles just press on but very very careful with them when removing and also fitting, to not bend or fracture anything with undue pressure.


Ralf S.

WD39 said:

My problem is that to get at the soldered side of the board I need to remove black faceplate and the needles from the gauges.
Does anyone know if there is a safe enough way to do this without destroying the instruments ?

Click to expand...

Twisting the needles anti-clockwise sometimes helps removing them without pulling the spindles out.
.

Thank you for the replies Davren and Ralf. I will give this a try at the weekend and update if I have any success. Cheers

Hi Guys,
I have made some progress on this - some good and some bad.

The good is that I have got the LCD display working again.
I stripped away the instrument needles and black instrument faceplate thus giving accesss to both sides of the board.
The main issue I believe was the 6-pin connector where the LCD panel is attached to the circuit board.
I removed the LCD screen (it's just a push-in fitting) cleaned all contacts with contact cleaner spray and when re-assembled everything is working again.

Now the bad news, the instrument needles needed a LOT of force to before they would come out and while two of them came away cleanly, the other two ended up with the spindles from the servos staying attached to the instrument needles.
Needless to say I was gutted but kept going anyway.
So when the instrument cluster was powered back up and LCD screen was looking good I still had a dead speedometer and fuel gauge.
I tried to re-insert the spindles back into the servo motors but I reckon that I ruined them during the removal process.
However, I have discovered that these servos aren't a huge deal to remove from the board, just 4 soldered connections.
The part numbers on all 4 servos are the same so I removed the servo for the rev counter (which was working well) and installed that one in place of the broken fuel gauge servo, so the fuel gauge is now working.

I will still need to buy a used instrument cluster to get myself two servos to replace the damaged ones (needless to say I will be extra extra careful with removing the instrument needles on this one) - I'm hopeful that some breaker's around Dublin might have one at a decent price.
I'm disappointed about damaging these two servos but will be happy if I'm able to keep the original cluster ( so will still have original mileage reading and won't need to proxy allign etc. as would be the case if a replacement cluster had to go in).
Hope this helps someone else anyway.
Cheers.
Enda

New stepper motors available here: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Stepper-...328521?hash=item3afe3a2c89:g:NrcAAMXQjWtRQ6QD
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Great, Thanks Davren I'll take a look

If you pull apart the switec stepper motor that the shaft came out of, you'll notice that theres a gear flapping about, sometimes you can prize open the case and push the spindle back in & reassemble the motor.
You can get sets of 4/6 from ebay very cheaply.

Tis it yerself WD39?

Hi Folks,
Thank you for all the replies and advice and apologies for the procrastination on actually getting around to finishing this. I actually sourced another instrument cluster on a local 'buyandsell' type website here in Ireland for a really good price (€20) and put that in the car to tide me over for the last few months. An impending compulsory NCT (National Car Test - our MOT) was the push I needed to finish this. The mileage on the replacement cluster was much higher than the actual mileage on my car and I'd obviously prefer that the original mileage was recorded on the test. So to cut a long story short, I was able to source the stepper motors on amazon for around £3.50 each.
I'm unable to post a URL link (as I haven't had 5 posts on here yet) but if you search for "X27 589 stepper motor" you will find them.

They took over 4 weeks to arrive from China but they work fine.
I just decided that I was probably safer to buy the stepper motors instead of the risk destroying the replacement cluster that I had.

The new stepper motors are X27/589 whereas the originals were x15/589 - I did some google research and the X15 and x27 just indicates that the x27 is a more recent version of the same motor (589).
It was a reasonably straightforward process to de-solder the four pins of each stepper motor and solder in the new ones but I took my time and was extra careful not to damage anything else on the board while soldering.
Luckily I ordered one extra motor just in case - turns out I needed all 3 that I'd ordered as one original motor that I thought was working was also broken.

I used the replacement cluster as a guide to positioning the instrument needles when pushing them back on to my original cluster.
The other parts of the console weren't too tricky to reassemble and the whole lot seems to be working great thus far, no issues after one week of use anyway.
I'll hang on the replacement cluster as a spare just in case.
Thanks again guys for the help.
Cheers.
Enda

WD39 said:

I used the replacement cluster as a guide to positioning the instrument needles when pushing them back on to my original cluster.

Click to expand...

If you have MultiECUScan diagnostic software, you don't need to manually position the needles. There's a function in MES to zero all needles.
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Wow, 41.0c thats some temp readout your having .....

Davren said:

If you have MultiECUScan diagnostic software, you don't need to manually position the needles. There's a function in MES to zero all needles.
.

Click to expand...

Where exactly is that?

spkour said:

Where exactly is that?

Click to expand...

I'm in Kerkyra until 21st and don't have MES with me to check. It will be somewhere in the instrument panel or dashboard section.

I used it several years ago after fitting an Abarth multi-colour instrument panel into one of my JTDs. One of the needles in the Abart panel was reading incorrectly, so I used the zero function to reset it. As I recall, all 4 needles slammed back to zero, then I had to switch the ignition off and on, then all the needles were reading correctly.
.

Davren said:

I'm in Kerkyra until 21st and don't have MES with me to check. It will be somewhere in the instrument panel or dashboard section.

I used it several years ago after fitting an Abarth multi-colour instrument panel into one of my JTDs. One of the needles in the Abart panel was reading incorrectly, so I used the zero function to reset it. As I recall, all 4 needles slammed back to zero, then I had to switch the ignition off and on, then all the needles were reading correctly.
.

Click to expand...

Thank you very much. Have a nice time in kerkyra.

Davren said:

I'm in Kerkyra until 21st and don't have MES with me to check. It will be somewhere in the instrument panel or dashboard section.

I used it several years ago after fitting an Abarth multi-colour instrument panel into one of my JTDs. One of the needles in the Abart panel was reading incorrectly, so I used the zero function to reset it. As I recall, all 4 needles slammed back to zero, then I had to switch the ignition off and on, then all the needles were reading correctly.
.

Click to expand...

Will an abarth LCD unit work correctly in a JTD, as i wouldn't mind doing that to mine ?

spkour said:

Where exactly is that?

Click to expand...

Just found an image I posted on the forum. It's "Value Reset" on the "Actuators" tab of the "Instrument Panel Visteon" section of MES.
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Zeewulf said:

Will an abarth LCD unit work correctly in a JTD, as i wouldn't mind doing that to mine ?

Click to expand...

As the Abarth instrument cluster is not designed for diesels, there's no glow plug warnng light (yellow coil) on it. Didn't bother me.... after you've had the JTD for a year, you know how long to wait for the glowplugs at various ambient and/or engine temperatures.

The Abarth panel shows varying oil pressures and oil temperatures on it's central multicolour display as 2 semi-circular bar graphs, so doesn't have a conventional oil pressure warning light. I tried several ways to hook the JTD oil pressure switch into it, but couldn't make it work. Ended up running a wire from the engine management ECU oil pressure switch output to a spare, red warning light on the cluster. The spare warning light has 120 written on it (speed limit for Saudi Arabian market). I opened the cluster and scratched the 120 off, so it just shows a plain red light while there's no oil pressure. Was tempted to mark it "OIL PRESS" with small Letraset.

Apart from the above, everything worked as normal.
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