OH Display & Compass Repair
For years there had been a Website with some images of how to work on the OH display to get it to light up again. From recent messages, it appears that the site has gone away so I was intending to put up a basic pictorial about this on my Webshots.
I had problems with my display like probably everyone has / will have. First my compass was getting wonky, dropping out or going into CAL mode. Since NJ is a peninsula, you are going to eventually hit water east, west or south, and if you leave NJ going north it’s easy to tell you’re in NY with the different plates, so the compass was not that important to me. But then my entire display started dimming and it wasn’t long before it went dark.
The forums and the website were great to find out that resistors had overheated and their soldered connections became loose. So with the information in hand, I found I had a few loose resistors. I fixed the two problem resistors and soldered a couple of others nearby. That took care of my display lighting up but the compass was still wacked. No problem though, being on a peninsula.
There have also been a few threads about the compass not working; including someone who has stated a dealer mechanic replaced the compass sensor to fix it. Well no matter where I looked I could never find that sensor or any reference to it. And I dismissed it as the “sensor” was in the board and I was not ready to buy a new board.
I started to have one side of my display get dim again, so I thought it was time for me to get off my duff and do the pictorial. Plus I thought that since some of the resistors came loose that powered the display, other components in the compass circuitry on the board may have the same fate.
I pulled the display down and re-soldered the resistors I had done before. While I’m good at soldering, these little guys and the production board soldering doesn’t bring out my best work. Looking around at the other components, there are resistors and other micro components that I can’t even touch with an iron. There were two other resistors that were of the larger size but did not appear to be loose from high temperatures. So I went through the process of re-soldering those.
After reinstalling the display it came back up fully lit and showed a CAL indication with no info in the compass direction box. But I went though and redid the ZONE correction, then got dizzy doing the circle recalibration procedure. The direction indicator was still blank so I shut off the motor and restarted. The compass has been working fine now for a week.
So maybe it was the two other resistors, the phase of the moon, or I just got lucky and by next week I’ll have a bad compass reading again. But right now it works.
And for those who need images of what the overhead display looks like and how to take it apart, you can find that here: