eumoria

This is for the people like me who either received a car or car with a cluster with a broken on innaccuurrate speedometer. Generally you should be able to swap out the entire speedo out of the cluster into the new one. In the case you cannot because it is broken or missing... the speedometer works with a very delicate tension spring that acts as a force against the spinning of the cable driven speedo. If this gets damaged you're stuck with the mileage of the donor cluster. Well not necessarily. My story goes as such, I have a 1988 Honda Civic STD that had the non-tach cluster. Pretty boring. I purchased a 89 Civic Si cluster from a junkyard for pretty cheap. I removed the 88 STD cluster and began to remove the speedo system in order to get the right mileage. Being the fat putz that I am, I screwed up the speedo spring and basically my MPH went up by an exponent of 2. So every 1 MPH basically = 2. This made the old speedo useless and I was stuck with 152000 mile reading on a car with only 92000.

Usually for most people this is no big deal, but I started to pry more into the situation because I'm **** retentive and every time I looked at the cluster it made me mad that I broke it and I'm stupid. So I needed to fix it or I was going to lose my mind... or speed all the time because I couldn't look at it. So I had a donor 91 non-tach cluster I started to experiment on. This is the writeup of how to set your cluster to the correct mileage for anyone who has replaced it, or changed over to a JDM/EDM one, or whatever situation exists where you mileage reading is not what your car actually is. If you use this method to roll back your odometer you'll be shot. No kidding.

I'm not going to go into detail on how to remove the cluster from the car, or the removal of the front plastic. If you can't do that don't bother doing anything else because you'll break everything. It's 2 tabs 8 screws and 4 tabs... not rocket science. We will begin at the point after the plastic is removed.

First thing you need to do is remove the needle. THESE ARE DELICATE. I can't stress enough how fragile this system is. You can break it very easily. Be very patient... it'll come off. I used a small flat-head screwdriver to slowly pry back and forth until it came off. VERY SLOWLY and VERY LIGHTLY. Also try and keep your fingers from applying pressure on the white needle, because it'll also crack if you're not careful. I luckily had a crappy cluster to experiment on and learn from. You probably don't so BE CAREFUL.

With the needle off and the loud cursing complete remove the 2 screws to the left and the right. You should now have something that looks like this:


remove the faceplate and little pink plastic light diffuser and you should now see the open cluster (i took this pic on the install so my mileage is already different. The faceplate removal will not magically change the mileage unfortunatly, sorry)


now flip the cluster over. You should see 4 screws around where the cable goes into the speedo. Remove those:


the speedo will now come out


Hold it in your hand proudly if you haven't broken anything.

Now we need to remove the resettable mileage piece. I'll explain later why this should come off. Although you don't need to I would recommend it when you see what we need to do. There's 1 golden screw on each side holding the odom. and reset push on. remove those:

Left Side


Right Side


Now with that removed you can see the tension spring that I was talking about.

Be careful not to touch, bend, push, stretch, or look at too hard. It's delicate. With that said here comes the most fun part. You need to pop out the top odometer section. I'll explain the principal of removing the top odometer section, but basically you're on your own. It's really in there. I tried for about an hour to pop out the right side to no avail. I gave up and popped out the left side. This was much easier because I had leverage from the front. You do what you see fit because there's really no good way to do this. It's not supposed to come out and you'll learn that real fast.

You'll also see why we removed the bottom section. You would've bent it to all hell trying to pry the top off.

The first TEST time I did this I removed the whole thing... But I didn't actually remove mine the second time, I just popped out the right side and worked with it on an angle as such:



Now I'll try my best to explain how to adjust the roller. It's not that hard and if you play with it for a while you'll probably figure it out a lot better than I can explain it. There are teeth on the roller, those need to be on the front or else the internal mechanism that keeps it clocking won't work right. You need to hang on to the tooth and spin the number below it in the right direction, then you'll see it'll cycle through the numbers. Always stay 1 number ahead. So, if you're like me and need 92000... start with 9XXXXX, then go to the next and cycle through 99XXXX and then flip to 08XXXX. Then go to the next and go to 091XXX, then go to the next and do 0919XX, then 09199X, then 091999, then flip the 1/10 mile until you flip to 092000. Get it? If you don't you'll figure it out eventually and you'll go OHHHH RIIIIGHT... DUH.



Now with your proper mileage dialed in, clip the top piece back in. Make sure the teeth are gripped onto the metal and not sitting above. You'll once again see what I mean. Reattach the bottom peice, reinstall the speedo, install the face.

Now you have to put the needle back on. Make sure you put in on at 0 MPH or else you'll have to go through the surgery of popping it off all over again and going at it a second time. (You know you don't want to do that.)

Reinstall the cluster in your car and enjoy your car with your correct mileage reading!!



VICTORY!


Modified by eumoria at 2:44 PM 7/24/2005

lYellowDragonl

nice write uP!

CRX_Control

i did mine a different way in that picture your thumb is on, i dont know what it is but i took that off and rooled the thing back to 000000000. (took 5 min to roll it back cause you can only do it in a certain order.)

HatchBox

how do you do this on a 94+ intgera ls cluster?

nice writeup, be sure to post this in the FAQ page


For those that dont want to take it all apart you could just take a cordless drill and put in the back where the speedo cable enters the cluster, and spin away!

eumoria

yea, the drill method does work with the cable speedos... but this is faster believe it or not hehe I'll post in in FAQ right now!

HatchBox

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by eumoria &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">yea, the drill method does work with the cable speedos... but this is faster believe it or not hehe I'll post in in FAQ right now!</TD></TR></TABLE>


yea the drill takes forever..

7PSI CRX

Excellent how to.

EXCELLENT!

Rywire

You can roll the numbers back faster if you move groups of them at a time rather than one num at a time. I have never shown anyone how to do this because of the greater chances of odometer fraud, but hey, oh well I guess you can look at it from another point of view, the car that you purchase will have correct mileage (if the person is honest). Good writeup though!!
Ryan


Modified by droppedcrxsi at 2:19 AM 11/30/2004

EFnerd

nice write up...lol i like how a lowest millage crx thread is above this one ironic

RCautoworks

Nice write up, but I feel so dirty after reading it.

Rywire

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by crxnerd &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">nice write up...lol i like how a lowest millage crx thread is above this one ironic</TD></TR></TABLE>

HAHAHAAH, thats crazy. LOL, I have -1,000 miles on my car now

dblock91

awsome, but i think some one did that to my hatch, for a higher sale price

KFBhonda

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by dblock91 &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">awsome, but i think some one did that to my hatch, for a higher sale price </TD></TR></TABLE>
http://www.carfax.com

CRX_Control

carfax doesnt work sometimes , on my car it said no accidents, it have a huge accident , then it said my car was checked up at 13k miles in 1992 or something, my previous owner did everything himself i guess.

bossman032

just take it out polk it with a test light and it will change what I did no problems you don't have to open **** just take out the front cover.

you gotta know the right place to polk it.

Mr_CRX

iTrader: (1)

polk?

poke?

bossman032

yea poke

slate13530

Poke what exactly though?

lunchboxEF91

GREAT write up! I will try it out!

l e o h j

very helpful writeup! i was about to get an crx si cluster from the junkyard before. but i had second thoughs, i was thinking of the mileage being change o wel. thanks to this write up, i can get my si cluster w/o having second thoughts.

now people can lower there mileage before selling the car.. without the buyer even knowing.. lol (unless they go check out your VIN at carfax) but hey if u do crap like changing your mileage before selling your car.. u should get arrested for mileage fraud scamming people just to get money isn't nice you know!

this how-to should be set to sticky

92integra_gs

nice and something really useful

LoneStarCRX

I bought a UKDM cluster and want to INCREASE the mileage to match what I actually have on the car. I never plan to sell as I am the original owner and still love the car.

dblock91

car fax huh? ill have to give that a try

ExospeedAMcrx

hmm it would be nice to have a 30K mile 1993 civic DX.
hahaha. j/p

Twilight

Very good writeup. Lots of good photos and explaned well.

And funny too. I'm soon having this VT cluster, and i have to roll it to correct km's.