MilanoCpe

my friend has a 97 honda civic ex and his odometer has stopped working for the last month and he doesn't know what to do. neither do I, so please any advice for fixing this problem would be greatly appreciated...thx in advance

MilanoCpe

Eran

iTrader: (1)

How many miles?

BlueIntegraBoy

iTrader: (5)

Does the speedometer work too?

MilanoCpe

his speedometer works but his odometer doesn't work...sounds weird to me.iono and his car has 154k miles if that helps.

melnkay

well you can rule out the vss.
did he do any wiring at all to the car.

MilanoCpe

i never asked him that, but im thinking he probably did do sumthing in order for not to work.

MilanoCpe

any suggestions?

Andres-eh2

try another cluster

BlueIntegraBoy

iTrader: (5)

I bought an Si cluster where the odometer gears were screws up (which wouldn't make it function). I suppose that the odometer can go out independently from the speedometer.

MilanoCpe

ok

nello a.

buy a new cluster or swap the speedo guage out of another cluster

silverboost

leave it till ur selling it value of car goes up lol

MilanoCpe

LOL that's pretty smart...

Hatchy-Ownzjo0

Wow.. What the hell.

Could be the soldering in the cluster. Try a different cluster maybe?


Modified by Hatchy-Ownzjo0 at 2:58 PM 1/21/2007

theolsons

The odometer quit working on my 1996 Honda Del Sol S. So I took the instrument cluster off. On the Del Sol this is actually pretty easy. I was surprised, although I should not have been, that there was no cable going from the transmission up to the speedometer. Instead there is a Vehicle Speed Sensor (VSS) on the transmission which sends pulses up to the electronics in the speedometer. A stepper motor is what turns the odometer. I thought there might be a mechanical issue. But I could not find any problems with the gears that turn the odometer.

So I got online and read in a honda-tech newsgroup that several people have found broken solder joints on the speedometer PC board. Most of the people who posted talked about the speedometer quitting. Solder fatigue is a likely cause because the lead free solders are less vibration resistant than the old tin-lead solders. I used a magnifying loop to check the joints and, sure enough, there were two cracked connections on the pins from the stepper motor. I have attached a couple photos. The attached close up photo is not very good. But you can kind of see the crack.

I used solder braid to wick up all the tin-silver (lead free) solder and then re-soldered the joints with tin-lead. I put everything back together and now the odometer works again! I probably should have touched up all the solder joints on the printed circuit board with tin-lead - oh well. If I have problems in the future I will do this.