Thank you very much. I'll respond back here with how it goes to help out anyone in a similar situation if anyone ever googles it.
Making a follow up post to let folks know that it went great and to recap my symptoms and what I ran into in the process of fixing.
- Info gauge was giving chinese looking lettering after startup. I assumed this was due to low battery, as I was riding it went away so I assumed that confirmed it. Eventually the info gauge only displayed chinese lettering. Then finally was blank / didn't have any info at all, over a period of a month.
- There was some fog in the info gauge that indicated probably water got in it.
- Disconnecting black battery cable and using a tester light indicated a short
- Voltmeter confirmed power was getting to the (blank) info gauge.
- Thus I bought a new (used) info gauge on Ebay. When it arrived, I jerry rigged it to get power to it to confirm that my old gauge was the problem: it worked (showed my fuel level, etc).
- As I said above and 2strokeboy confirmed, I needed to remove the "cover" off the "hood" to remove the old info gauge and route the wire for the new one. The reason is because the info gauge comes out toward you which means you need to undo the plug from the mpem and pull the plug and all the wire up through the cover. The plug is too big to allow this. Thus you need to remove the cover.
- I unscrewed all the screws (5.5mm head, needs deep socket. I used a 7/32" deep socket instead). There were also other things I needed to remove to allow the plug to fit. The diagram only shows one side of the ski (so actually need to double the amount of screws to remove) plus doesn't really show about 5 others at the front of the cover.
- The main problem I had was that the majority of the posts on the cover that the screws drive in to were broken. Maybe only 6 of the ~14 posts were not broken. I know I broke one of them but the others were already broken as if someone had been in there before and broke them. There was other evidence that this was the case. I'm second owner but have owned for 12+ yrs.
- Epoxy/jbweld the broken posts back into place seemed to do the trick.
Here is what I ultimately needed to do:
-Cover (pink arrow) needed to come off of the hood (blue arrow). Hood stayed attached the whole time.
-Everything in green needed to come off to allow the cover to come off and allow the wire for the gauge to be routed through the fiberglass hole.
- Basically all the 3-N*m screws and then part of the hydraulic arm to hold the hood up to get it out of the way of the plug.
- The green/orange box is where there were an additional 5 3-N*m screws that I don't think are labeled here. I saw 4 of them but there is one at the very tip of the cover that I missed and snapped the post while removing.
