Ok well I ended up grabbing a tach and odometer from a 98 mounty (cheaper than an entire cluster). It's different. Very different. Now that being said, the differences were not unworkable but there are definitely different clusters by year. I grabbed this one because it was literally only 500 miles more than what my truck has on it so it matched almost perfectly.
It was however GREEN, my cluster has the blue backing so my other gauges did not match. Now this may not have been an issue if I was using the entire 98 cluster. The other issue I had was my idiot lights were in different spots on my 96 cluster vs the 98. Again if I had swapped the entire cluster this issue probably would have fixed itself because of how the newer cluster was wired to work with the newer gauges.
In a nutshell what I did was used all my original parts but put only the odometer in behind my original gauges. I haven't driven the truck far (just up and down my driveway at 35 MPH) because it's not registered, but all appears to be working.
My best advice for anyone in the future, grab the entire cluster. Don't try to save a few bucks and just change a specific gauge unless you look closely at part numbers and any differences before purchasing.
