[sonic_mikey]

sticking pulleys sometime have a burning smell that comes along with them. We had a customer at work complaing of such a smell and it turned out his AC compressor pulley was sezied lol.
As for the gagues, the random spike in the reading usually means there is way too much resistence/ not enough resistence (depends on type of sending unit) in the circuit, and the info is being displayed accordingly. Pull the sending unit for each gauge and hook an ohm meter up to it, then cross reference the ohm reading to spec.