The title says it! I replaced the broke gear and the odometer still won't work. I removed the instrument cluster and double checked everything. The gear is fine and everything was installed properly. Could the little motor that drives the odometer be bad?

I've heard of this happening before - people replacing the gear to find out the motor is bad ...

The gear was definitely bad (teeth broke off). I may just hit the pull-a-part this week end and see what I can round up. I know the car had low miles on it when my step dads father bought it. He babied it so I am pretty sure the odometer is close to correct. I want it to work for oil change, so on and so forth.

put thrust washer under the main part you took the small gear from. sometimes they just jam there on that lower bearing, tho' motors and capacitors are known to fail too. look for stains on the circuit board, indicating leaks from the larger capacitors-try not to touch the fluid (pcb's sometimes), arrange replacements of same style, uF and voltage, and things might improve. Warning the caps are polarized. IE they fit both ways round, but connect only one way-make map of the negative stripes, and fit the new ones identically oriented. Soldering heat should be minimal, with resin cored solder, and DON'T blow on the molten joints to cool them.

Hi Brad,

Check your PM's. Not sure if my message went through, so if it didn't, here's a fix that I figured out (after much beating of my head against the wall) that worked for me after my gear replacement appeared not to have worked. I've copied the original post below. It's rather long but might help:

SOLVED!!!

Figured this one out, it's long winded and tough to explain, but I bet it accounts for at least 50% of the folks who've tried the new gear fix and had no joy! The Odometer motor or power supply to the motor has been a suspect if the OD gear fix doesn't work. Blown motor, bad sensor etc etc. Well I don't think I've ever heard of a motor blowing in the OD, and looking at the construction I can see why! Anyhow.........

Ok, here goes:

The OD motor is constructed in a mirror image of most electric motors I've seen. In your average electric motor the casing contains the magnets and the spindle in the middle (the part that rotates) contains the copper coils. In the OD motor the casing contains the wound coils and the spindle is a solid magnet and is loose inside the casing when the casing is unscrewed from the odometer. Inside the back of the spindle is a spring loaded plastic insert which is designed to seat on a plastic pin in the back of the casing and keep the spindle in place/prevent it touching the back of the casing. Trouble is that the front of the spindle is NOT supported when the motor is disassembled, so it sticks to the side of the casing. Problem here is that when you reassemble the motor (ie screw the casing and circuit board back into place on the OD) the spindle is slightly off centre, therefore the front part of the spindle (the metal pin sticking out the front) doesn't seat properly in the recess for it that exists inside the OD. There's no easy way of telling whether or not it's correctly seated once the motor is closed up, and so I simply put it back together assuming all was well and then discovered that my OD still didn't work.

So, I took it apart, cleaned it, discovered the broken tooth, removed it, reassembled the gears and the motor again, being careful to ensure that all the teeth in the gears were seating correctly in their respective runs, and discovered that the OD STILL didn't work. So, I started looking for new instrument clusters!

Then I installed a stereo and, as I had the panel apart, thought I'd have a crack at it again, this time taking out the spindle and really looking at the constrction of the motor. It's then that I noticed the spring loaded insert in the motor spindle and had a little epihpany.

The seating part is the trick. I noticed that when I reassembled the motor I could see the back of the spindle through the vents in the back of the motor casing, and I could see that it was leaning slightly and was also right up against the back of the motor casing. So, I took it all apart again, found the little hole into which the FRONT mounting pin of the spindle was supposed to fit, and then reassembled the whole lot again, taking particular care to ensure the spindle mounted correctly. This was almost impossible to see, but I fiddle with it until I noticed that the spindle was sitting clear of the back of the motor by a few millimeters and could see that it wasn't leaning. It's a pretty obvious difference thinking about it.

I put the whole lot back in the car and took it for a spin and lo-and-behold the OD worked! Woooooooohoooooooo!

So, although you can be as careful as you like putting the OD back together this is a real gotcha and is in no way obvious unless you really take the whole lot apart and examine bits you normally wouldn't see.

Maybe I'm stating the obvious after all, I'm no mechanic and had all but given up. I hope this helps someone! I hope I described it adequately, any questions just give me a PM