3 separate gauge clusters, none of the ODO's work, seems about right, yeah?
 

Have just re-constructed all the battery harness ('E') harness wiring in my car, as it was all missing when I bought it. Fun job. Going through figuring out what needs to be fixed on the body electronics. So far, seems I'm a lucky boy and most stuff is working.

I've got three gauge clusters sitting there, 2 green, one amber. None of them are the original one from the car, but I figured at least one of them would have a working odometer.... I'm wrong? Have plugged them all in, and they're all blank. Can see the backlight illuminating the display but nothing else.

They don't need anything else except power to the gauge cluster right? I've powered up just the gauges themselves before (not the entire cluster) and remember the odometer working... So I'm 99% sure this is the case. Looks like I've got three re-capping jobs to do. At least one of them better bloody work! Otherwise that OLED replacement screen being worked on over in the group buy section is looking mightily tempting.

At this point re-capping the FD odometer is almost a requirement, if you are lucky 1 cap will fix it.

Yeah, a maintenance item by now pretty much eh?
I'll do all of them on all three I think, may as well only have to pull them apart the once. Once of them has a stuffed / burned polarising film too. Haven't tried repairing one of those before, so that'll be fun :-).

Is the engine in the car? If the engine harness isn't connected/grounded I don't think the odometer will work.

Dale

Engine is in the car, but none of the (EM) wiring for it is there, I haven't built that harness yet.

Interesting. I might do that before pulling them apart and recapping them all.

I have powered clusters up on the bench before though and had the odometers work, just power and ground to a couple of places, one of them the illumination for the odometer display, so I figured they didn't need any other connections. Maybe I should spend a few mins this morning and power all these ones up on the bench, see if I get any different results.

that changes everything. theres a ground(s) on the harness that will cause the odometer to not register..... at least in my case

Yeah, cheers Dale and Cr-Rex for the heads up, absolutely the case! Powered all three up on the bench this morning and two of them are working fine, albeit one of the is the one with the burnt / crusty polarising film. So still some repairs to do, but one of them seems fine so I'll use that and put the other in the 'to be fixed at a later date' pile. That pile is getting pretty big!