Wow, I must say it feels good to do this job knowing that I saved myself a trip to the shop and therefore saved loads of money. I had to give myself a pat on the back for doing something that I thought I did not have the skills nor the confidence to do. I mean, taking out the instrument guage panel? You're messing with sensitive electrical stuff there. That's too complicated and you've never done something this "serious" before! Well, thanks to Eric's and Dave's instructions on their website, I mustered the strength to take out the instrument panel and fix the odometer myself. Everything went according to their instructions. The only problem I experienced was removing the black circular and semi-circular plugs from the instrument cluster! They were plugged in tight!



The culprit to the stopped odometer was the tiny gear, which had a broken tooth. The tooth ended up wedged between two gear teeth. I took it out and put in the new gear.



Since I had the instrument panel out, I also swapped the temperature compensation board with the iPd TC board bypass kit. The TC board was fairly easy to remove.



When I got the kit, I thought $14 for this piece of wire? It turned out it was $14 well spent. The space where the TC board is located is pretty tight, and soldering would have been a bit frustrating. The iPd wire has ends that simply slide into #1 and #3 pin. Having a needle nose plier helps in "plugging" the pins to the bypass wire securely. I had to be careful not to shove the wire over the pin or else I could bend or snap the pin off!



On average, I guess it should take one hour for a newbie to swap gears, but I took my sweet time and made sure I did everything correctly. I also cleaned the dust off the instrument panel and the area on the dash where it sits. That's what I like about doing things yourself, you can take your time and do things that a shop would probably not do and feel satisfied at the end.

I'd like to give special thanks to Jorrel for giving me the odometer gear gratis, rstarkie for the TC board pics (which I found in the archives), Eric and Dave Shannon for posting step-by-step instructions, and everyone who helped me with this project with their replies.

Just three questions now :P

1. After swapping gears and putting the speedometer back on the circuit board, does it matter where/what position the tiny odometer gear sits inside the big gear?

2. I had the trip meter set to zero before I swapped gears. I guess during the swap, the farthest right digit slightly moved so that 9 and 0 are half showing. Is it safe now to press the trip reset button so that I get all 0s before I test drive it?

3. What do I do with the removed TC board? It doesn't look damaged, just never made the temp. guage read correctly in that sometimes the needle did not move from its OFF position or when it did move, it was usually between the 9 o'clock and the OFF position.

Thanks all!