ShoeFlyShoe

I'm almost sorry to be starting a new thread, but I'm exhausted from searching and coming up with pretty much the same answers (not to knock the forum - everything's been insightful). But none have helped so far.
I had intermittent cluster failures which I fixed by banging and pushing on the dash (worked for weeks at a time), pulling the cluster and cleaning the connections, scraping, spraying, lubing... I took the Jeep to the dealer for a recall (# 00V105000 - AIR BAGS: FRONTAL: SENSOR/CONTROL MODULE) and it seemed unrelated, except that now all my gauges and overhead map lights are dead at start-up, and stay that way until I blow the horn! When I do that, everything wakes up. Seconds later, the tach, speedo and map lights die, but the gas, temp, oil pressure and voltage gauges continue to work. I can find no correlation between the horn and instruments/lights. Could the dealer's relocating the airbag control module have had any effect? Everything worked fine for the first day after the recall work was done. Any ideas?

jeeptech40

there is a tsb for the connector at the back of the cluster will not look like typical corrosion or losse pins corrosion in the form of black residue on pins they sell an updated pigtail may have to be looked up under a tj but its the same connector also look at and clean engine block grounds known for poor ground causing back feed in v ref circuts part number for connector is 1-05016261aa should cost around 20 bucks at dealer hope this helps

ShoeFlyShoe

jeeptech40 - thanks for a speedy response. Yeah, I know about this TSB, I've been trying to avoid it because of the soldering requirements (not one of my strong points). And I'm still stumped as to why blowing the horn causes everything to work (well, almost everything). I did run across a post where butt connectors were used in lieu of soldering, and the poster seemed satisfied with his efforts. I'll get the parts and give it a go!