www.iFourWinns.com

Installed the new plug and play gauge panel today and had fingers crossed that it would solve ALL my gauge problems from the old VDO panel....

no such luck, it looks great but aside from the temp gauge now working everything else is the same. No speedo (paddlewheel) no trim, no fuel, no oil pressure (this worked on the old panel)

While non of this is a natural forte of mine, electrical is even more outside my knowledge base, aside from basic speaker wiring and soldering I don't have a lot of experience. Should I tackle these one at a time with a meter, start swapping senders out? pull all new wiring through for each offending problem?

looking at it all today there is an interesting hodge podge of wires in addition to the factory harness, it may just be dealer optioned out but the blower, bilge pump and speakers all are differently pulled off the main harness.

I re-did all the connectors for the speedo as they were a pretty impressively screwed up...to no help, as well as the trim sender which had a broken wire inside the gimbal housing, didn't expect much from the trim as I its a common fail item but was hoping for some luck with the speed pick up.

Just wondering where to start, not going to lose a lot of sleep over it but now that I have a fancy looking panel it would be nice to have everything work.

In other news despite intermittent snow showers it started on the first turn and ran very well for 20 minutes on the muffs.

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Jon Miller
1998 four Winns Horizon H200
Volvo Penta 4.3 GL
Newtown, CT

untitled-545 by millerjont, on Flickr

Start with making sure that they all get power from the ignition terminal on the ignition switch when you turn on the ignition; they all also have to have a sense wire that comes from the sending unit. So there are 3 wires on each (I=from ignition, S=from sending unit, G= ground)The voltmeter is different in that there are just two connections.

http://www.boatinghowto.com/content/tro ... auges-124/

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88 Four Winns 200 Horizon
4.3 OMC Cobra-4bbl
2002 Walker Bay 10/2012 Suzuki 2.5
2008 Walker Bay 8

1998 Jeep Grand Cherokee 4.0/Selectrac
2007 Jeep Grand Cherokee 5.7 Hemi/Quadradrive II

Thanks for that link Lou....exactly what I needed...

_________________
Jon Miller
1998 four Winns Horizon H200
Volvo Penta 4.3 GL
Newtown, CT

untitled-545 by millerjont, on Flickr

I'm having the same issue with my "plug and Play" cluster. My original cluster had a dead speedo, trim and temp gauge. The plug and play one has a no temp, no oil, no volt, also no panel lights dunno about the speedo). I'm suspecting an issue with the harness/connector itself, probably on the power or ground side. Luckily I have the boat stored in our garage at work that just so happens to be a 12v fleet up-fitting shop, so at least I have all the tools and equipment necessary to deal with the issue. I'm going to play around with that this week hopefully.

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1996 205 Sundowner
"Comin' in Hot!"

Lemee know if you find anything obvious......

was hoping to dig into it a bit this morning but need to go to work in an while

_________________
Jon Miller
1998 four Winns Horizon H200
Volvo Penta 4.3 GL
Newtown, CT

untitled-545 by millerjont, on Flickr

Good news bad news...

Replaced the main ground on the engine with new stud (old one broke) connectors etc. After that fuel gauge worked, oil pressure, water temp, volts and even got the speedo to jump around a bit while wiggling the gauge pack connector.

Bad news all those gauges work in the old VDO cluster now too ..... alas I do like the new one much better and will feel better about putting the old one on ebay one of these days.

posting pics of the conditions of the wire, they looked pretty corroded and messy, clipped back about 2 inches and it didn't get a whole lot better. I was able to tin the new ends and solder them into the new connector so hoping I got a better connection (obviously something changed) but wondering if this is an indicator that ALL the wiring might be suspect, or rather this is just how 15 year old boat wired look like.

Still no speedo or trim indications.....but happy to have the primary engine gauges working.

FullSizeRender.jpg by millerjont, on Flickr

FullSizeRender.jpg by millerjont, on Flickr

IMG_2847.JPG by millerjont, on Flickr

_________________
Jon Miller
1998 four Winns Horizon H200
Volvo Penta 4.3 GL
Newtown, CT

untitled-545 by millerjont, on Flickr

Are those the ground wires that fix to the stud by the starter motor ? On my last V8, I found a huge amount of corrosion there ( the exhaust manifold drains pour water directly on to that area, plus VP used their whole electro- chemistry set when they selected the multitude of metals there.

The tinned ones don't look that bad, but the untinned copper corrosion looks pretty grim.

Did you check how much voltage you're getting when you take a reading across the ignition terminal and the ground terminal for each gauge? You have to have power there, for anything else to work. Make sure that the fuses don't have oxidation on them, I just had this problem = no ignition, gauges, blower or bilge pump. They all decided that they had enough salt air at the same time lol.
I did some poking around the dash under my boat which is 10 years older than yours and the wiring was in better shape than I thought. The wiring you showed, is why boats should have only tinned wiring even for fresh water use. I found a number of junction blocks under the dash, any one of which could have corroded terminals inside. I didn't want to chance pulling those apart, but I did open up the main harness connector that runs from the engine (big cylinder shaped connector with 8 or 9 terminals inside) to make sure the terminals were clean. They looked pretty good, so I coated the ends of each half of the rubber part of the main harness connector with grease and put it back together with a stainless hose clamp to keep it together. The ignition/gauge wiring comes from here as far as I can see in the OMC manual, but where it interfaces with the boat wiring gets confusing. F/Ws wiring schematics are very hard to read at least for the older boats.

http://www.fourwinns.com/upload/Documen ... orizon.pdf

Here's yours maybe you can enlarge it and make some sense out of it. I looked at it for a while and it looks like the inputs for the gauges, come from the 8-pin main engine harness (on the engine), to another terminal block (under the dash) that appears to have 24 pins (maybe not all used though) and from there, the wires run from that junction block to the all in one gauge cluster. So there are 2 places at least where you could have trouble, one is at the main engine harness connector, the other is this large terminal block just before the wires hook up to the gauge unit. I'm thinking your problem has to be in either one of those or both....look especially at the wiring for the switched power from the ignition switch and the ground.

_________________
88 Four Winns 200 Horizon
4.3 OMC Cobra-4bbl
2002 Walker Bay 10/2012 Suzuki 2.5
2008 Walker Bay 8

1998 Jeep Grand Cherokee 4.0/Selectrac
2007 Jeep Grand Cherokee 5.7 Hemi/Quadradrive II