Im driving home from school one day and I look down and my tachometer isn't registering anything, I thought the cluster was the culprit but I had a buddy of mine with a 96 civic hatchback(dx) install my cluster is his car and it worked flawlessly. Seeing as the cluster is not the problem I need some help figuring out what it is that is causing my tach not to work
98 civic lx automatic
IT BUGS ME SO MUCH!!!!!!

 

So, on you cluster, there is a connector C. at pin 8 is the tach signal. From the diagram you can see getting from the ignition control module (ICM) aka igniter to the tach goes through a couple connectors. I don't know where they are, but you sould be able to test from the ICM tach signal pin (disconnect the connector at the distributor), to the C8 wire (disconnect from cluster). Use a meter to see if the wire is good. Or see if you can get voltage at C8 with the C connector off the cluster or the cluster removed. See if you get voltage at the test tach connector. You can't expect to look for a specific voltage because the signal is a waveform, like a square wave. Anyway, a high end auto meter can read the signal like a tach, but if you put your cheap multimeter on AC then DC voltage and you see something, at least you know potentially it is working.

The continuity test probably needs some extra wire to span all that way from the hood to your dash, but maybe it will reach depending on the meter and how you route the leads, lol.

 

Did your tach needle bounce up and down quickly before it stopped working? Is the car running rough?

 

It was on when I cranked the car up that day and about 10 minutes into my drive I noticed that it was at 0rpms and thought that the car had died but it didn't. The car runs just as normal as it did before it stopped reading. But I didn't notice it bouncing before it went out.

 

You were right!! The wire that sends the tach reading was unplugged inside the distributor, plugged it back on and I was good! Thanks a lot man!