97+ gauge cluster in a 96?

kastein said:

ehall is correct. The amount of change in the system is quite significant.

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joe_peters said:

Speaking from ignorance (as usual) but was there that big of a change between the 96 OBDII and the 97 OBDII? Body change, sure, but all of the electronics?

Renix 87-90, OBDI 91-95, OBDII 96+?

Again, haven't faced this issue so school me.

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kastein said:

96 was the bastard year... picture an engineering team sitting around going "shit, we have to make this thing fit these specs NOW". They fixed the bare minimum of things, and broke some things while doing it (fuel level sender for instance is ultra stupid as we've already discussed.) They changed a bunch of connectors in 95.5 or so while prepping for the OBD II systems, those stayed the same for a while. 96 supported very little fault detection, i.e. it won't notice if you disconnect the shift solenoids from the TCU and drive them yourself. In 97 they did a full redesign of the ECU, TCU, ACM (added, airbags in 95/96 were self contained mechanical), OHC (now fed CCD signaling for fuel economy display and whatnot), and... instrument cluster. The 91 through 96 instrument cluster is *mostly* the same (electronic VSS/odo, all gauges fed via their own wires from the subsystems they monitor, fuel gauge wiring is different in 96 though) while on the 97 up, almost all the signaling to the instrument cluster is via the CCD bus.

So you *could* make it work, but you'd have to basically put a 97+ ECU in, and make it happy with a full 97+ wiring harness and sensors, or put it in parallel with the original ECU, fool it into not reporting a check engine light, and send it all the same signals so it could communicate them to the instrument cluster via CCD messages. Also I believe the 97+ instrument cluster is shaped differently and would require the 97+ dash... and once you have all that crap torn out you might as well swap all the harnesses and stop fooling around, right?

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