E30 Zone

Hi guys,

I'm not sure when this happened, but my left indicator light in the cluster has stopped working.

This became apparent recently when trying to diagnose an indicator problem... My left hand side indicators would cause a buzzing noise under the dash. This turned out to be the passenger side wing-indicator live+earth wires contacting.

With this now fixed I've turned to the problem of no dash instrument indicator for the left hand side, the right side works as expected.

To troubleshoot I've taken a wire and, through the hazard switch, have directly powered both the left side and right side of the indicators on permanently...

All the bulbs on the right hand side work, including the dash light... the left hand side, all work BUT the dash light in the instrument cluster.

So, I took the clocks out, and swapped the bulbs... which made no difference, so It's not a blown bulb.

I used a multimeter to test the BLUE/RED wire pin contact that goes into the back of the instrument panel, and it is receiving power, 12v when tested with ground... this matches the other pin with the BLUE/BLACK wire for the right hand side lights.

can anybody tell me which of the wires EXITING the pin goes to ground for this wire, so that I can test/trace it back to earth?

I managed to get 12v connection from a brown/green wire on the pin, although I can't find any documentation anywhere to know for sure that this is the earth for the red/blue.

Is it likely something could have happened to the contacts in the instrument, while I was experiencing the buzzing noise and damaged something?

any advice would be great,

Thanks for your help

Looking through some notes I made a while back...

the cluster is grounded to the vehicle earth through pin 20 of the blue connector and also pin 16 of the white connector.
with the cluster out you should check that internally the following pins have continuity on the back of the cluster:

white: 6, 21, 3 & 16

if all in order, there is an internal soldered joint on the cluster that connects white 16 earth to the LH bulb...

Hey Mark,

Yup continuity test revealed it was a problem with the board, found the rd/bu pin and couldn’t find any continuity from that to any other pin. So got a second hand board, built it up and it works again.

Thanks for the info, was able to check the new board for these pins, and learned something new.

Thanks for your reply.