Peeps,

I have a '98 Z28 with an automatic transmission and recently (as in a few months ago) I've noticed my RPM gauged is whacked. When I crank her up and leave it in idle, the RPM's stay steady at around 5-6k! But my car sounds fine, and I'm obviously not running my engine at such a ridiculous RPM rate. And whenever I hit the gas, or am cruising along at 55mph or whatever, the RPM gauged is peaked at 7k! Always. When I stop at a stoplight or stop sign, there is a delay before the RPM gauge needle slowly creeps back down to about 5k.

What could be causing this, and is it a major expensive fix, or something simple that I can do on my own? I've scheduled a time to take it into a local Chevy dealer on Monday, but they're going to charge $85 just to look at it and tell me what I already know ("It looks like your RPM gauge is busted..."). There's no telling how much they'll charge me to fix it...

Any ideas?

 

Guys n gals,

I took my car to a GM service station and they said that the car is fine, but my instrument panel needed to be replaced. A stock part from GM would cost about $375! So I looked on Ebay and found one for only $66. However, the one on Ebay has roughly 66k miles on it's display - my camaro has about 87k miles.

Is it ok for me to install the instrument panel from Ebay on my camaro, even though it will reflect a lower mileage for my car? What are the legalities on odometer readings?

 

Just a couple thoughts. Is the RPM correct on a scan tool? Is the ebay one for a '98? Thinking '99 and up may be different? There was also a TSB on the '99 clusters for sweeping gauges/resetting the trip odometer on start-up too with low voltage. Don't know about the legalities since it has that much lower mileage, but for the price I'd change it out and if it fixes the problem ask later.

 

I don't know if the RPM is correct on a scan tool. I'm not that mechanically inclined, so I don't even know what a scan tool is. The GM service station said that the engine was fine and that my excessive RPM indications on the gauge did not reflect anything wrong as far as my engine was concerned. They said that the only correction I needed was a new instrument panel - I'm assuming that the RPM gauge is just busted.

The panel on Ebay was from a 2000, but the guy said that he believes it will work with '98-2002 models. Looking at the pictures, I cannot tell a difference between it and the one I currently have in my car.

I'm thinking that I'll go ahead and purchase it and install it, since it's over $300 cheaper than the one GM wanted to order for me! I'm going to record my mileage from my panel before I take it out, and record the mileage from the new one I will be putting in and keep the records in my glove compartment or something. The only legal problem I would assume could only come from if I try to sell the vehicle and not tell the customer about the difference in the actual mileage of the car and the one shown on the panel, thus getting a better value out of the lower mileages (and rip off the customer!). But if I keep the record of the differences and just add it up and present that information to the customer - if I ever decide to sell the camaro - I don't see why that would be a problem.

 

Before purchasing call a dealership and have them look up the part numbers to see if they're the same. I looked it up in the old part number thread on ls1tech and it listed different numbers for '98 and '99 - '02.