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Can y’all take a look at my soldering job and see what I did wrong? Or if I burnt the board and done for? I think the dark spots are just from the rosin and need to be cleaned off with alcohol or something, but I’m not an expert at all so any advice is extremely helpful. Hopefully the picture I took shows up okay.
The odometer mileage numbers was blinking randomly before, but after a couple soldering sessions it won’t show up at all now. Just the light from the bulb (which I needed replaced too). Tried removing the solder with one of those suction tools and putting new solder on but that didn’t help either.
Bonus, lol: I also have an issue with the cluster where on the right side (facing steering wheel and dash) the right plug that goes into the cluster on the top seemed to have some issue. My map/dome lights blink randomly as well and if I jiggle that plug around it will go off. My locks will automatically lock when I take off from a stop (stop light or stop sign) a lot of times, but that is likely a separate electrical issue.
I might ship my cluster to one of those “stores” on eBay where they fix it and ship it back.
Thank you for any responses and thank you for this post altogether!
Can y’all take a look at my soldering job and see what I did wrong?
It's hard to tell from a picture but those solder joints in the red boxes to me seem to still look cold. Also where indicated with the arrow, does that scratch go through the foil and all the way down to the board?
When resoldering these joints, try to remove the old solder and apply new LEADED solder. Often you can add leaded solder on top of the old solder to help it melt, then use soldering wick to remove the majority, then clean with flux and apply new leaded solder. This will give a much better and stronger solder joint than the factory solder, and will permanently fix the issue with broken solder joints. If you're able to trace where the connections go on the PCB, you can test the joints for continuity with a multimeter to ensure that the joints are good.
Some folks seem to be posting pics of soldering jobs on much later instrument clusters than this post was meant to cover. This is for the blanking out odometer on 1999-2003 and 2004 F150 Heritage. There are known issues with other clusters over the years but not that this thread was intended to cover. If you have a later model with other issues corrected by soldering repairs you should start a new thread so others can see your finds.
