fixed my non rolling Odometer!

SON240sx Automotive
1

warning short novel ahead.

my odometer stopped rolling 2 weeks after i got my car. It was speratic (sp?) sometimes it would work sometimes it wouldn’t. Sometimes i could hear it tick as if the gears kept skipping.
First i took the dash apart and opened up the cluster and tried to roll the trip meter, sure enough with little force the gears would skip (white gear would skip, thus the trip wouldn’t move and neither would the rest of the ODO), “OK!, I need a new trip meter” i thought to myself.
Went out and got myself a cluster off Average Player for cheap (Thanks a million and nice meeting you), checked the gears on it at his place and they were stiff and didn’t skip, perfect.
Went home and took apart my dash again, replaced the trip meter, took her for a test drive and she was couting every metre i drove.
One day later it stopped, took my dash apart again and made sure all the gears were nice and tight, checked for skipping and it was fine, scratched my head and said fuck it, i’ll figure it out later. I watched my ODO for the next week and noticed that it would start working every once in a while but would get stuck whenever it had to roll more then 4 gears at once but it wouldn’t tick so no gears were skipping, so i figured the KM gears where fucked.
Took the dash apart again and and decided to roll bak the ODO i got off AP from 250KM to my 156KM reading, so i got a metal shaft, put a gear on it, attached it to an electric drill and began rolling it back. Well, the power drill doesn’t spin too fast and it was going to take forever, so i got the bright idea of using my all mighty 32000RPM dremel, start slow and increase that speed!. DO NOT DO THIS AT HOME!! the gears ATE themselves at 32K RPM and the metal shat warped itself (it wasn’t perfectly straight, i admit it) and flew off the dremel and hit me in the eyes area, THANK GOD FOR SAFETY GLASSES!!!, me OK and they all scrathed. The 250KM ODO was fucked at this point and seless.
Well since that scared me enough to stop, i began to think straight. OK, 4 gears equals “stop working” on my 156KM ODO, that means the ODO motor equals weak, '89 ODO i got from AP equals 250KM which equals working for a long time and that equals strong working motor, so I swapped the motor from 250KM ODO into mine.
Sure enough that worked and my ODO has been working flawlessly.

thats my long ass story, let me know if you need me to clarify anything as i tend to type what i think and it always makes sense to me.

If your ODO is not working and you would like it to, then i can give you some pointers. LOL

2

interesting… both the ODO and TRIP meters in my SR cluster (from my clip) haven’t rolled since i installed it (odometer is stuck at 058555 and trip is at 0000)… everything else in the gauge cluster works fine.

any suggestions?

3

When cruising at about 60-80 or so, roll up your windows, mute the radio, and put the car in neutral so that there is no engine load noise (hopefully your exhaust isn’t too loud) and listen for a clicking sound coming from the cluster. If you can’t hear a clicking then it could be the motor on the ODO that is weak or shot, in which case you would need to replace it, it’s easy enough to do. Also check all the gears on the ODO assembly and make sure they are good (no missing teeth) and tight.
If that doesn;t work then look for anything that might seem off, play with the ODO assembly and learn how it works, it is simple, really simple.

4

my last cluster was intermitant, sometimes it would work sometimes not.

I think I fuct the speed sensor when I ran 205/75/15 winter tires.

Is it just me, or does anybody else think that the engineers would make the cluster in a fashion that it ONLY spins forward, and spinning it in reverse would damage/brake it? IE: TAMPER-PROOF

I only say this cause I witnessed (not at my own hand) someone hook up a drill to a cluster and roll it over (999,999) until it hit 125,000, it took a couple days (as I recall)

5

So if you hear a clicking, you need to replace the odo with one from someone else’s non-fubared cluster?

6

if you hear a clicking noise it is most likely your trip meter that is skipping, not the whole ODO.
For those that do not know, the trip meter is the small counter on the right, the one with the white counter, the one that you can reset with the reset button.

The ODO design is simple, there is a motor, it moves some gears attached to a metal shaft, that moves some gears which moves trip meter, when the trip meters hits 1KM it moves the ODO reading up by 1KM. So if you trip meter does not work then your ODO will not move.
The white gear on the far right has 10 numbers (like all other gears), 0-9, each number represents 100 metres not 1km.

Hope this helps.

7

Okay, so I still need a new cluster though, right? To replace the trip meter.

8

yes sir… you can get them pretty cheap off parts cars