TheMAXX

0 – 100mph in 1 second

I had the speedometer out to fix the odometer and I hooked it up to my variably speed drill. When I turned the drill up to full the speedometer went right up to 100 in 1 second and down again to 0 almost as fast. My drill wouldn’t go any faster then about 105.

I always reset the trip meter when I fill up the tank and I did that earlier this week then I noticed the next day that the trip meter was reading 007 like it did the day before and I had driven about 3 miles at that point. So I wanted to fix this as soon as possible to maintain the accuracy of my odometer. I learned a couple of things that no one tells you about this job (Odometer) 84 – 944

They tell you to just pull on the horn pad – well the horn is held on by 3 plastic pieces that are rather brittle after 20 years. So 2 of the 3 broke. This is called a horn sleeve; it’s the part that’s on the steering wheel. I ordered them for the local dealer and they are only $3.20 each. But they don’t have any in stock so it will take about a week to get them. I don’t know if it would have made any difference but instead of pulling straight out like I did I think it would be better to pull 1 side off then the other side and then the middle.

They tell you to mark the steering wheel so you can get it back aimed the proper way. But this is kind of difficult because on this year car (I don’t know how the newer ones are) the shaft is recessed so deep good luck marking it with anything. Then good luck seeing this marks. I just made sure the wheels were straight and that the steering wheel was straight before I pulled it off. And I seem to have gotten it back on straight.

The instrument cluster was a little bit of a pain to slide out but not too bad. I did have to unscrew the turn signal housing and the turn signal module to get the housing out of the way. With the cluster out the speedometer did slide out the front as they said.

Once you have the speedometer removed the instructions say -

“Remove the bezel from the front of the speedometer by prying up on the bezel's back lip with a small flat tip screwdriver. Work around the circumference of the lip until the bezel is free from the unit. “

Well “pry” is too mild of a description it should probably read “bend the back of the bezel up a little bit at a time because there is a lip around the speedometer that will require a bit of bending of the bezel to get it off the front of the speedometer”. Oh and good luck getting a screwdriver under there and getting enough leverage to start bending it.

Now after all of this it turns out that the gear was rock solid on the shaft and it was in good shape. It turns out that for some reason the shaft had slipped towards the other side of the numbers on the odometer. I pushed it back very carefully and then tried to recreate the dislocation of the shaft and found it required a lot of force. More force then required pushing it into the correct position. So after pushing it back into the correct position I checked again and it seemed to stay, at least for now. Time will tell if this fix will hold.

The instrument cluster went back together fairly easy. But because I had to bend the heck out of the bezel to get it off I only slightly bent it back. I am not quite sure how to get it bent back flat. But I figured I would wait a little bit to see if everything continued to work ok and then think about how to flatten out the back of the bezel. Because the bezel isn’t flat on the back of the speedometer it doesn’t sit quite right in the instrument cluster. And if anyone ever pulled the dash apart the speedometer definitely looks like it was tampered with. But my purpose in doing this was to maintain as accurate of an odometer reading as is possible. Sometimes you can’t win.

While having the instrument cluster out I noticed that the hose leading over to the vent on the left of the steering wheel was a bit crushed by the speedometer cable. Maybe that’s why there hasn’t been much A/C coming out of that vent. I may need to try and route the cable under the hose and see if I can then get it uncrushed.

I also saw a relay bolted up behind the right side of the cluster that isn’t connected to anything and there aren’t any connecters just floating around. Strange place to put a spare as you cant get to it with out removing the instrument cluster or the dash.

See attached pictures for demonstration purposes. If this works.