Hi Folks, I need some help with this.
Over the summer I picked up a 96 passat glx auto wagon that, aside from an annoying oil leak, has been a pretty nice ride. The MFA indicator on it, though, has never worked at all and after making sure that the switch on the wiper lever was working right and the conductivity through the relay panel was good I assumed that the problem was a broken solder joint somewhere on the cluster. These panels have had problems, like a lot of you all know, and indeed this particular one was replaced by a dealership in 1998 or so. The tach has always read about 30% high, too, when compared to the actual figure through vag-com. So I put working on the cluster aside until the weather got cooler and I could take it apart. Which I did today.
Here's where things get weird. As I'm looking at the cluster and comparing it to the drawings in the Bentley, it just doesn't look right. Instead of having three separate dial faces for the temp/fuel gauge, the speedo and the tach, this one has two: one roundish one for the tach, and then an oblong face for the speedo and fuel/temp combined. With the bezel on it looks like three, but underneath it's really only two.
And the topper: the digital clock in the temp/fuel gauge, where the MFA oughtta be, is just too small to have the MFA. The LCD is smaller than the odometer. I checked against another 96 glx wagon down the street, and his cluster is definitely different.
The part number stamped on the bottom of my cluster is 3AO 919 910GX, The last "x", by the way, has been hand-written on - not part of the original stamp. Underneath is a serial #: 1497063176. There's a part# sticker on it that reads the same as the 3AO number stamped (with the X printed properly here).
Can somebody out there with access to VW part numbers tell me if this cluster is the right one for my car? Since every B4 I've seen (not many, admittedly) has had the MFA, I'm beginning to wonder if maybe the dealership put in a cluster that should have gone into a diesel, or maybe into a completely different model, like a golf or jetta.
Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks a ton - Chris