Just pull harder?

[Anomaly]

Before I dig myself into a hole, thought I better ask for some advice/tips here. My 1981 T3 California came to me with a crack in the plastic gauge housing. It is totally an aesthetic issue as everything works fine but a replacement popped up online at a price I couldn't refuse. Here's the "new" one:





I removed the two screws holding the part in question to the other part housing the gauges and began to gently pull up on the part I was trying (hoping?) to remove. Then I tried not so gently. Then I took some photos and stopped to start this thread.... The "problem" appears to be that all the bulbs invoked are inserted into recesses on the underside of the part I'm trying to remove:




I can separate the two parts just enough to see in and see a mass of 40+ year old wiring and don't know how hard I should be pulling on things....

Is there a trick I'm missing?

In the good news department, while doing all this, I took the opportunity to remove the speedo so I could get a close look at the missing trip meter reset knob. Yay! It wasn't broken off, just not there and the threads look OK:

[Tkelly]

My t3 has t gauges .The bulbs go in individual cylinders on the top piece,if you get that together,round nuts on the bottom screw on two bolts coming down from the new screen to hold it together with the bike.Maybe yours is different,good luck.

[Anomaly]

My t3 has t gauges .The bulbs go in individual cylinders on the top piece,if you get that together,round nuts on the bottom screw on two bolts coming down from the new screen to hold it together with the bike.Maybe yours is different,good luck.

Thanks. Mine is slightly different, the two plastic pieces that comprise the instrument cluster are held by two machine screws that thread into the larger piece from below. I have those screws out and can separate the two plastic pieces, but only just slightly. The piece I'm trying to replace houses the bulbs in cylinders like you describe and I think after 40+ years the bulbs are fairly stuck in there and I can't reach them directly to try to extract them from the cylinders. All I can do at the moment is try to further separate the two plastic pieces but that involves pulling pretty hard on the wires connected to the bulb sockets.

[moto]

I have exactly the same dash that you show, on my T3. It is a later version of the original T3 dash that adds turn signals and a brake fluid warning light. I don’t remember any tricks involved with assembling or disassembling this dash. I’d just pull harder, but my memory might fail me on this.