How to adjust the odometer spindle

[banpei]

The speedometer on my gauge cluster has had issues with a jumpy/stuck needle ever since I got the car, but lately it has been getting so bad that I fear it will fail any day now. I have lubricated it in the past, but that never solved the issue. Luckily, I have a spare GT-V gauge cluster from which I can scavenge the speedometer assembly.

To match the odometer reading of my old cluster, I had to adjust this unit. In one of the Juicebox videos, they adjust the odometer, but they don't show exactly how they do it. My experiment ended up with some broken plastic, hence I'm creating this write-up to prevent someone else from making the same mistake as I did.

To get started, the unit looks like this when the needle and faceplate have been removed:

The odometer spindle is secured in place by the tabs in the red circle. Use a knife to cut this open from the top carefully. I didn't do this and broke one of these tabs.


After having cut the tabs, you can lift the spindle out.
The spindle is driven by the gear on the right, and every revolution will be something like 4 kilometres on the right-most roller. Instinctively, you want to reverse or forward by rolling the gear, but in my case I had to do about 34000 revolutions to get to the correct mileage. But there is another much quicker way...

At the bottom of the roller, a black plastic rectangular clip secures each and every roller to the spindle.

You can undo this clip, and then the rollers can roll freely. However, every roller is connected to its left and right neighbour and it will somewhere get stuck on a tab of either of these, meaning that you can't just move the second roller from the left by itself.

Instead, you can undo the clip for the four right-most rollers, securing the two left-most rollers. Then you can rotate the four right-most rollers all together, and this will then adjust the second roller from the left up or down, like it normally would when it turns over the ten-thousands. Then you can work your way down to the thousands by securing the clip of the third from the left and repeat the process with the three right-most rollers.

Now you can put the spindle back into the assembly:

The plastic clip has to rest upon the metal ridge in the red circle. Now you can close the holes you created earlier with some filler material and glue this to the assembly. Alternatively, you could use plastic weld to fill the hole, but I haven't used this method myself as the plastic was very brittle.

[Ivan141]

Word of caution: Getting things nicely aligned when putting them back together is NOT easy. At least I thought it was a major pain in the ass when I did this on 'the Doctor's AE92 cluster.

[banpei]

Yes, I forgot to mention that as well. As you can see in the last photo, I managed to misalign them when I put it back.