This 2005 Buick Lesabre Custom came in with the complaint that the fuel and temperature gauges were not working properly.
Since the gauges had gone way past the high marks and were circling back around, I was pretty sure the stepper motor in the gauges were failing. I did do some testing with my Tech 2 scan tool just to be sure though.
The first step in removing the instrument cluster is to pull the knee bolster trim panel from under the driver’s side of the dash.
I used a plastic pry bar to get a good square pull on the headlight switch trim panel. I know to be extra careful with this step as it is easy to break the switch lose from the trim panel.
You can see that there a spring clip at each end of the trim panel. The headlight switch of course needs to be unplugged.
To remove the right hand trim panel, the three phillip’s headed screws at the top and right side have to be removed.
You could take the time to remove the whole glove box but I found it easy enough to just flex the glove box enough for the trim panel to release from behind it.
There are several spring clips along the way as I removed it. I started from the far right and worked my way back to the steering column area.
I did some other needless work and then realized that all I had to do was to remove the two 13 mm nuts from the upper end of the steering column.
Doing this allows the steering column to drop down enough so that this one 7 mm headed screw can be removed.
There is another 7 mm headed screw at the far right of the instrument cluster trim panel.
Then it was just a matter of taking my time and carefully releasing the spring clips along the way.
The little bit that the steering column will drop down with the two 13 mm nut off is enough to remove the trim panel.
There are four lever latches that hold the instrument cluster to the dash carrier.
It takes a bit of maneuvering to pull the cluster out. The steering column has to be pulled down some and the upper dash pad has to be flexed upwards.
Well the cluster is out and in the next article I will show how to change the stepper motors.