'90 740 Turbo questions

IIRC, you pop out the rubber plug, and push the button in and hold it for several seconds with the ignition on and the light should go out.

WD40 is pretty worthless, you can get much better penetrating oils. I like P'Blaster, seems to work well. I also frequently abuse wrenches by slipping a length of iron pipe over the handle to get more leverage, or you can do it right and pick up a long breaker bar. Make sure you're turning the bolt in the correct direction too :)

Thanks. Just what I'm looking for. Ignition on, several seconds until the light goes out.

I've got a breaker bar but I don't think it will fit in the gap available

- can't even fit a socket wrench in there, just regular flat wrenches - so I'll look around for a piece of pipe and see if I can pick up some of this P'Blaster stuff in town.

Remove the rubber plug & just push in the button

I also tried the "hold for a few seconds" method as suggested by James Sweet. Nope... that only works on my old Ford Thunderbird. As I learned a few weeks ago with *my* new-to-me 1990 740GL, the "Service" light interval is run by gears inside the cluster, just like the trip odometer. To reset (asssuming yours is like mine, and they haven't changed things just to make me look bad), you can't just push it in (like I did) a couple of millimeters, expecting it to be like an electrical switch. You have to push it that far just to contact the gears inside, then a much harder push to spin the gears back to "zero". Considering you can't see the gears, it's difficult to know how hard and how far to push. Once my gears decided to cooperate, they let go so suddenly that I thought I had punched a hole through the back of my instrument cluster, but luckily everything still works.

You can also hook a couple of wrenches together, just hook the box end of one on the open end of the other and get more leverage that way. Are you sure you're taking out the right bolts? It's been a while, but I don't recall there being any that hard to access on the brakes.

electrical switch.

A couple of years ago I had changed the oil myself and couldn't figure out how to reset the "Service Engine" light. Somewhere on the web (I hadn't found this list yet) I saw that you just pushed the button below the speedometer.

I did just that and it worked, EXCEPT that I hadn't realized that it was not, in fact, a button, but a plug that I was supposed to have removed.

As you can imagine, I still have a rubber plug stuck inside the instrument glass, but it does still work. Someday I'll take the cover off and get it out,but it doesn't seem to bother anything.

Best to all,

Perk (:>)

It's actually pretty easy to remove the cluster and take it apart. Just be careful not to get fingerprints on the gauge faces or inside of the window, it looks as bad as having something in there.

Thanks. I figured that out after some experimentation. Had a couple screws hanging around and started with one that was too short and it didn't reset no matter how long I held it in so I tried a longer one and it reset pretty much immediately.

It's not super tight - just too tight to easily get a socket set or breaker bar on it. Could probably fit with a low profile socket, but I usually only buy those as singles for individual jobs. I think the main problem is the bolts (two of them) are somewhat corroded and stuck to their threads as a result.

They have threadlocker on them as well, so you need to use quite a bit of force. When you reinstall, a dab of loc-tite or similar product is a good idea, use the removable stuff, not the red permanent locker.

Did you know the fellow who invented WD 40 tried 39 times before he came up with WD40 thats why is is named such .?Tap it heat it wd40 tap more you will get it loose .

That's one of many myths surrounding the name of the stuff.

At any rate, WD40 is crap, there's much better stuff out there.

Yeah, you can't even believe their own website.