the other day while i was drivin' hoem from the U-district in seattle, my tach decides to die. just dropped down to 0 suddenly.

i was thinking it may be a loose connection behind the dash panel. in which case, i'd just solder it back on there tight.

anyone else have this problem?

where should i start looking?

 

seems like a common problem and i believe i have read here that it is caused by a faulty ignighter on coil, the trailing i believe, but if its something else, i'll be corrected im sure,,,good luck

 

yep, Donna's right. Check out your trailing ignition system. Of course, depending on your year... If you've got an 81+ electronic distributer, check yer trailing ignition system, your ignitor or coil may have gone bad. Count yourself lucky, when the wire came loose on my trailing coil my car STOPPED, since the ECU on the -SE's take their spark trigger pulse from the tach's input off the trailing coil and it thought the car had stalled so it stopped running. EUGH. Anyway, on the - side of the trailing coil you'll see 2 wires, but only one on the minus of the leading. The second wire is the tach signal wire. So check the whole trailing system and go from there.

--matt

 

Hook up a timing light to your Trailing wire. That's probably the easiest way for somebody to check to see if their Trailing stuff is still working because you don't need to unhook any ignitor or coil/plug wires.

The tach on my Cosmo died and I tried all sorts of things. Checked continuity of the tach signal wire from the coil hookup to the dash multi connector, I moved the tach signal wire to the Leading side, I hooked a Heathkit homemade tune up meter with a built in tach, and the Trailing was working fine. I really do have a bad tach.