968 Speedometer/odometer gear replacement

Aaron brought by his 968 last night to have me go through the speedometer cluster. The 944/968/911’s are notorious for the plastic odometer gears breaking, and thus the miles stop accumulating as you drive 😉 Aaron of course brought this in immediately when it broke 🙂 How do they break? Well over time, the plastic can get brittle and just flat fall apart, but the #1 cause is from people hitting the odometer/trip reset button while the car is moving. This will always strip the gear. It must be done stationary instead. There are a couple of different option gears (tooth count) when replacing these gears, so you can either remove your cluster and count the teeth on the gear, or just spend the extra 25 bucks and order the extra gear. I like doing that, as once I have it apart, I want to have parts quickly, and the cost of NDA’ing a part will eat up that 25 bucks anyway. So for $75.00, we had the 3 gears at our door (2 we need, 1 would be incorrect obviously). I get the gears from http://www.odometergears.com

So first thing is to remove the cluster.

Steering wheel and airbag need to come off, as well as the vent/cluster trim.

Then the cluster needs to come out. There are 3 connectors on the back that have dual wings that you push outwards to release and it spits the clip out. Someone has been in here at some point for something as 2 of the connectors are missing half the wings, lol. Took me forever to figure out why I couldn’t find the other wing! Judging from the slight ding in the speedo needle, they had to be into the speedo for some reason.

Turn the cluster over and remove the philips screws for the housing.

And you get this. Once you are out of the protective housing, you must be extremely careful as the needles and the needle posts are very fragile.

4 screws on the back to remove the speedo.

On the side of the speedo is the motor, remove the 2 screws for that and the gears are under there. Here you can see the little gear that sits on the larger gear (slides on) has a broken tooth. That is our culprit.

The big gear that needs to be counted. With the new gears, they were obviously different sizes between the two teeth count, so it was easy to figure out which I needed without counting 🙂

And the 2 new gears assembled.

Installation is opposite of removal! A quick test drive and everything is working properly!

Next up, trying to diagnose and fix the studder after filling up the gas tank.

About porschedoc

The details of my life are quite inconsequential... very well, where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize, he would drink. He would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Sometimes he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy. The sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament. My childhood was typical. Summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we'd make meat helmets. When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds- pretty standard really. At the age of twelve I received my first scribe. At the age of fourteen a Zoroastrian named Vilma ritualistically shaved my testicles. There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum... it's breathtaking- I highly suggest you try it. Ok, for those that can't figure it out, that is actually not my profile, but that of Dr. Evil's profile from Austin Powers. Though chestnuts are indeed lazy, you can't argue with that.

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