an idea for those of you who want your HUD to reflect better from your windshields. just use "silver mirror" window tint. just install it on the inside, use enough to only reflect the HUD display..
just a thought.....
Car: 1990 Nissan 240sx Cost: Free Difficulty Level: 1 out of 5 Time: One to one-and-a-half hours
If your car has an HUD, the chances are pretty good that it has quit on you. While the reason for them failing may be as simple (to some) as a bad capacitor or solder joint, I will tell you how to fix yours with very little to no electronics experience. Here’s my story: The day my HUD stopped working wasn’t unlike any other day. I started up my car in the morning to run an errand and my HUD was working fine. The next time I turned on the car though, the speedo was black. I didn’t know exactly what was wrong, but I did narrow the problem down to the cluster itself since other clusters worked just fine in my car. Furthermore, sometime during the period when then HUD wasn’t working, I replaced my battery and when I turned on my car, the speedo worked for a second and then died again. This led me to believe that it had something to do with the power source to the unit. I had a KA24E cluster in my car and a CA18DET cluster (kmh only) lying around. Ideally I wanted to maintain the MPH/kmh function so I figured, “What the hell? Let’s crack these puppies open and see if I can make my MPH/kmh cluster work once again.”
Here are the two speedometers. Notice that the Japanese one has a MPH on its LCD display which goes unused. The units themselves are easy to remove once the clusters are out. Two screws hold the chassis in while the red wire goes to the rear of the cluster and is attached with a third screw. This is presumably a power wire due to the color. You also need to remove the clip that comes from the odometer. The Japanese cluster has an additional clip that goes to the chime, so don’t forget one.
I noticed on the Japanese cluster that the HUD selector stalk only had two wires going into a four wire clip. The US one has more functions, which is probably why all four pins are used. So I thought since the Japanese speedo worked fine, maybe I could just take the US selector stalk and put it on the Japanese unit and
maybe retain the MPH & km/h switching function. As luck would have it, I couldn’t get the two screws out to remove the stalk units so I thought about how I could do it another way. Besides, there was no way of knowing if the Japanese speedo had the logic to support the switching feature anyway. Also, since I suspected the
power board of being faulty on the US speedo, and I know that the Japanese one worked, I figured I could just swap them to solve the problem.
I compared the power boards and noticed two differences. The Japanese cluster had the chime clip and some kind of chip to the left of the chime clip wires. The chip looked a lot like a voltage regulator so I just assumed that it was there to help power the chime. Other than the chime, which I reasoned was unimportant anyway, the two are identical.
Here is a detail of how the power is transferred to the board underneath which controls the speedometer and HUD units.
Here is the faulty US power board. On an interesting note, upon removal of both power boards, I noticed that the control boards have different chip sizes. The Japanese board, again with less functions, has a chip which is smaller than the US board’s chip. Now, I don’t know if this is because of the different years/chip availability or the amount of functions. But either way, it’s way bigger of a difference than an added chime on the power board. I’m not so sure that I would have been able to swap the HUD selector stalks between units. Anyway, I installed the Japanese power board on my US speedo unit, leaving the chime plug unplugged, and my speedo works again! So if anyone’s speedo is busted, I suggest swapping the power board out from a worthless Japanese cluster or one from a friend’s car or something.
-Trunk