2000 - 2002 original Teleflex tachometer / RPM gauge

[machyy1]

I am hoping someone has one laying around after swapping. I am hoping to take it apart and try to hook up the screen to my guage, since my screen broke, and I can't read the hours on the boat I just bought. Much thanks!

[Silver Cove Marine]

I just checked my stash, and I don’t have any right now. Chances of anyone having one that actually has a working screen are near-zero. What I would suggest is checking the hours on the PerfectPass if the boat has it. I think the keys to press are Menu and the up arrow at the same time.

[machyy1]

Thank you for checking. As long as the LCD is not cracked (like mine), I think I can make it work enough to read if I can get my hands on one. Unfortunately the boat does not have perfect pass.

[s_kelley2000]

Does it have a GM or Ford motor? If GM I believe the engine hours are stored on the ECM but not the case with Fords of that era. If it's a GM you can get the hours with a scan tool.

I know I have some extra Air Guide speedos and a few various spare gauges, let me check if I have a tach but I think it would be different than the one you are looking for.

[machyy1]

It is a Ford carb'd engine, so no ECM to read hours there. Here is a picture of my broken one looks like. Thank you for taking time to check and look!

[s_kelley2000]

Those gauges were pretty prone to failure unfortunately. If I have one it it is the older style tach that I don''t think would be compatible. With your engine setup, I don't think engine hours are stored anywhere other than on the gauge itself so if you found another gauge it would not show you your true hours, it would either be zero or whatever hrs were on the boat it came from. Do you have any service paperwork to determine approximate hours? Either way I would add an hr meter so that you can keep track of service intervals and not really worry about the total hours unless you have some paperwork or something to get you in the ball park. If you have a guess on hrs, you can hook the gauge to a battery to bump the hours up to where you think they should be.

[MN Ryan]

Sometimes you just look at something like that and think, "Who in the **** thought that was a good idea?"

[machyy1]

These guages have two separate circuit boards that plug into each other. I believe the hours are stored on the bottom board, not the screen board. My plan is to swap the screen board from one that works onto the base board from mine. I hope that will give me the hours from my boat, as I also believe when these "stop working" it is really just the screen that dies.

[s_kelley2000]

Ah ok I see what you are trying to do now. Hopefully somebody has a gauge they replaced that was still working for you. jpwhit is really good with fixing the modern screens, perhaps he has a source for a screen board that might work for what you are trying to do?

[jpwhit]

That's a 100% custom LCD, so I think it's a real long shot in finding one in working order since they haven't been produced in almost 20 years and were not used by Nautique over a lot of models and time. I also question the assumption that the base PCB is functional unless you did some testing for example to see if the CPU clock on that board is even running.

My gut on this is the effort to get something working enough to retrieve the hours isn't going to be worth the value of knowing the hours on the boat / engine. For a boat engine of this age, the hours just aren't very important. Assessing the current engine health with some testing including compression test, leak down test, and scoping the cylinder walls and combustion chamber would be more worth the time investment than trying to retrieve the hours from this gauge IMO.

[machyy1]

It is mainly a curiosity (finding out the hours), and I agree that an engine health assessment is much more important. Compression, leak down, and scoping are on the agenda, but probably won't happen until the spring and I have the electronics all sorted out.

[fsts2k]

2 years ago I had one I could give you that kind of worked, it is gone now. That said, what I found was that the screen would actually "work" if the connections were cleaned. My LCD was spotty but would come to life for a bit if the connections were cleaned and reset between the boards. If someone can get you a screen that isn't blown up like the one above, your plan may work.

Just a thought

[machyy1]

I found someone online who had one still working, and they were kind enough to ship it to me. When I got their gauge, it showed 218.3 hours. I took it apart, plugged their screen into my base board, and BOOM!! There are my engine hours! So the main board has been working all this time, just the screen was dead!

[SilentSeven]

+1 for 1600+ engine hours!

[MN Ryan]

Cool beans.