How to: Repair Nissan GTR instrument cluster where LEDs have failed

It is a common failure point with these cars that the backlight illumination for the instrument cluster stops working over time. You may see one or more of the gauges being dark or dim where the lighting has failed. Seen more often in the older cars, the issue will first start manifesting itself as one or two of the right hand side gauges loose illumination, then over time the problem moves across to the left. This affects the water temperature gauge, fuel gauge, shift indicator display, speedometer and tachometer.

In this video I show you how to disassemble the instrument cluster, and replace the backlight LEDs.

Chapters:

03:00 Power connections for bench testing
08:55 Front plastic facia removal
15:20 Plastic shroud removal
19:45 Gauge rings removal
24:40 Needles removal
42:32 LED type discovery
52:02 LED removal (soldering iron)
55:34 LED fitting (soldering iron)
01:00:50 LED removal (hot air)
01:04:45 LED fitting (hot air)
01:09:10 LED test 1
01:12:08 LED test 2
01:15:52 Message display disassembly
01:25:25 LED removal (hot air)
01:26:22 LED fitting (hot air)
01:30:46 LED test
01:31:45 Message display re-assembly
01:40:00 Cluster re-assembly

The LEDs I used for the repair on the main board are PLCC2 type surface mount LED with a colour temperature of 10000K. The LEDs used for the message display illumination are PLCC4 also 10000K. Both of these are slightly brighter for the same current draw than the original LEDs.

For those of you wanting to carry out this repair yourselves I have sourced a quantity of these LEDs and offer them for sale as kits from the following Ebay link (when they're gone, they're gone!):
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/266900856305


This is the first time I have done this repair and there are some errors along the way, showing these will help you not to make the same mistakes - so don't be too harsh with the comments 🙂

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