Hello -

I recently picked up a 1995 Civic LX with the 1.5l (D15) w/ just over 100K miles. It's a great little car and gave me a warm welcome within a couple weeks of a leaking water pump. Went ahead and did the t/belt, pump, and all that good stuff this weekend and now I'm on to finish up a couple small issues; one being to fix the speedometer and trip meter. VSS is good, so before I think about grabbing another cluster, I am inspecting the wiring. Upon starting my inspection, I noticed two wires that had electrical tape wrapped around them. Unwrapped and found this:



It appears to be a splice, but the smaller wire looks like it's inserted into the larger gauge wire and there are strands just hanging out from the larger gauge wire. Then the wire I circled on the left has three smaller wires going into one larger gauge wire. Normal?

 

its very common for the speedometer to go out on these cars. do you have a CEL? if not than the cluster is bad. if you do, pull the code and it will probably be for the VSS.

 

There is no CEL, so I guess replacing the cluster will be my next step.

Whether or not the wiring shown above has anything to do with the VSS, should it still be redone or is that how it is from the factory?

Thanks for the help!

 

Does the CEL work?

Where is the connector shown in the picture? What color are the spliced wires and where do they run? More information would help.

 

The wires in question are on the very bottom connector of the stack of three that are there directly to the right of the passenger strut tower. The one wire circled to the right is in the top-middle pin position of the lower connector. The others, I didn't take time to look yet and was kind of confused by the fact that three wires ran into one larger gauge wire.

And yep, the CEL does work.

I will pull out the repair manual this evening and see if I can trace the wires and report back. Just never have seen an electrical connection like this before.