[PEGAZUS]

The instrument cluster is roughly 3 x 4 x 10 inches in size. If they're fried, it's $ 700.00+ to buy a new one. To transfer your accumulated mileage to the new one, both the new one and old one have to be shipped away to get the mileage dialed in (at an additional cost). If you're familiar with eprom burners, you know there's no magic involved but they will pretend there is just to soak you another $300.00+ for 5 minutes of work plus shipping. They won't ship the old one back.

The cable behind the cluster is held in place with a plastic twin-grabber lock clip that rotates 90 degrees to lock / unlock the 1 x 2 x 2 inch electrical connector that feeds the cluster. If you break the clip (as I have in the past with another vehicle) Ford wants you to buy the entire cable ($ 500.00+) instead of the 4-cent lock clip. The connector colour and clip colour are two different colours - it's an assembly of two parts - the parts could easily be sold separately and you know why they won't.

If the clip is broken, you can't drive the car. As soon as the unlocked connector vibrates loose, the car shuts down like the key has been turned off. At highway speeds, it gets exciting quick - you have nearly no steering and not much else. It drives similar to a GM that way (if you heard the news today) when the key falls out of the ignition.

There is one circuit card assembly / printed circuit board inside the cluster that is physically attached to the connector. There's nothing on the CCA / PCB except runs, if memory serves. All it does is interface the control signals with the light bulbs spread out all across the cluster. The bulbs are controlled by the main computer fed to the cluster through the cable.

Other than the speedo template, the rest of the cluster is just plastic. The largest part secures the various layers of the cluster in place, and makes sure there's only one idiot light illuminated per light bulb. Each bulb is lined up with a light tube that directs the illumination onto one specific part of the speedo template to light up one idiot light. Other bulbs are scattered around without light tubes to provide more generalized backlighting for night time driving. There are a series of plastic clips to lock everything together including the clear dust shield nearest the driver.

If the paint on the template is too thick, no light will be transmitted. The only way to repair a damaged speedo template is to drop in a new one, or replace the entire cluster for 2x to 3x the cost.

As no one I spoke with had any clue about adjusting the acceleration rate of the speedo needle through re-programming / re-burning / gear swapping, I dropped interest and simply replaced the MPH speedo template (or disc) with one that >> accurately << provides KMH at the ration of 1 MPH to 1.609344 KMH (60 MPH is 96.56 KMH). As my Saleen's computer has the speedo needle pointing at 10 o'clock when doing 60MPH, I needed it to point to 10 o'clock when doing 100KMH.

The last 0-240 KMH template I tried said I was going 70KMH when I was doing 100KMH. It has the 100KMH position at 12 o'clock and not 10 o'clock. If you physically remove the needle and place it at the 12 o'clock position when at 10KMH, the needle will not sweep back to zero when you stop.

My new 0-320 KMH template will be installed in a couple of weeks. After the driveway is clear of snow and ice and the salt is gone off the roads (next October at this rate), I'll try it out. I've been using the GPS to tell me my speed - it is accurate as I have checked it against another vehicle. I have both the original MPH and the new KMH templates in case the next owner wants to switch it back. As the GPS can be set to MPH whenever I need to, I can safely drive in the USA without having to rip the dash apart to drop in the MPH template.