RE: Odometer gears

["Lowe, Daniel" <DLowe@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Jake,

I just repaired mine last week.  Sounds like the same problem as yours.
The speedometer is the same on the E28 and E30.  My problem was the
large black rubber gear that is driven by the very small gear drive
gear.  There were four teeth missing.  Two were side by side.  That's
where the small drive gear was stuck.  Well, at least that was my
initial diagnosis.  A friend of mine had a cluster and let me take the
black gear out of it.  I installed the gear and manually spun the
odometer gears.  The small gear was pinching two teeth together at one
point.  Looked at the small gear some more and realized that it had
cracked and there was now a gap bigger than one tooth both small than
two.  So, since I foolishly let my friend have his speedometer back
before making sure it worked, I had to shave some off the small gear and
glue it to the drive post.

Why did I tell you all this?  Just wanted you to be aware that the
obvious problem may not be the only problem.  Check both of those
flexible gears.  The other two gears are plastic and should be okay.

There are only two ways that I know of obtaining the gears.  One is to
send the speedo to a speedo repair shop.  Figure a standard $100 to fix
it.  The other is to find a used cluster and get the gears from it.
These are on ebay all the time.  You may also have a friend like I did
that has a speedo laying around that you can scavenge.  There may be
other models that the E30 and E28 that used the same speedo but I don't
know which.

Regards,

Daniel L. Lowe
BMWCCA #93878
M535i SIG #103
'87 325iS     184k+
'88 535iS     152k+

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