I noticed a rattle coming from the center of my dash off and on for a long time. This past Saturday it was particularly annoying, so I decided to look into it.

I first looked at all of the threads on center dash rattling. It looks like there are a number of areas/sounds that are occurring. I decided to start with something easy, like remove my Daystar panel and see if I could see any problems.

I noticed two things. My compass was loose, and the plastic cable tie down appeared to be too big (because of the storage areas on the Daystar panel). I tightened the compass and put a piece of tape between the plastic standoff and my radio and took it out for a listen. The rattling was greatly reduced so I deiced to make the following changes.

Here’s the offending plastic cable tie down:


I cut it off:


And added some extra tape to my wires, and held them down with a new tie wrap through the hole:


I also added some tape to the back of the compass module:


Compass module re-installed:


After making these two changes I took it out on the local streets, and the rattle is now gone. I won’t be able to take it out on the trail for another week or so, but I think that plastic cable tie down was the culprit.