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Intermittent speedometer
- Thread starter Rob
- Start date
How spooky. Mine packed up on the way home from Lincomb. This was Scott's truck originally - the one he mentions early on in the post. Sounds like this could be one of those things to add to the list of known failures around the 22 year old mark. Not looked at mine yet, but sounds like the sensor to me. I do have a spare somewhere. Somewhere .....
Bingo! The fault lies in the speedo itself. Not too tricky a fix if you can lay your paws on a soldering iron. [emoji4]
Quick update, still working 100%. Wish my hateful Smart car was as easy to fix!!!
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Yep. Mine did that and only for the first few hundred yards or so.
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2010
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- 5,515
It may not be necessary to change the gearbox sender. Just cleaning he contacts cured mine.
I've had this problem on and off for a few years now. Looked it up and found the speed sensor oily so eventually earlier this year I replaced the speed sensor. Great, that's cured that I thought. Wrong, it came back this week after I returned from 10 days away. But this time, the needle stayed at zero for a couple of miles, enough to turn the odometer. Bingo, the fault is in the speedo itself!!
So took the dash apart,
View attachment 33136
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took the binnacle out and removed the speedo
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Seemed like the top tracks on the PCB were blackened. Thought this was by heat at first but there was no other sign of this. Gave it a light brush with a fine wire brush and the fault showed itself.
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A broken track at the top of the board. So, soldered a small wire across and replaced it all in the reverse order after spraying a little lacquer on the PCB to stop any further corrosion and, so far so good, all works, no fault…but you never can be sure with intermittent faults so I'm still keeping my fingers crossed.
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Pretty sure this is it. Only time will tell.
Hi, I wanted to add some more information because this thread is high in the list of results for a Google search on "80 series speedo not working".
So, the speedo in my 80 series wasn't working.
I bought a cheapie Chinese transfer case sensor from eBay for $14 and thought that might be a cheap fix. It wasn't, and BTW Toyota wanted over $500 AUD for a new one. I ended up putting the original one back in.
Having read StarCruiser's post I proceeded to pull out the dash and dismantle the instrument cluster. At first I couldn't see any bad tracks on the PCB but after some brushing and sanding to remove the varnish I found a break. I jumped the break with a bit of wire and put it all back together.
Took it for a drive and the speedo STILL wasn't working. Cursing, I pulled back into my driveway and noticed that the trip meter had a couple of km on it and it wasn't working earlier. I surmised that the PCB track had fixed the odometer/trip meter and that meant that the speed sensor wasn't the problem.
I pulled the speedo out again and looked for more broken traces on the PCB but there were none. I was looking at buying another instrument cluster when I noticed there are two electrolytic capacitors on the speedo unit. Having had problems previously like blinky dash in a Toyota Soarer fixed by replacing the caps, I went and bought one of each of them and replaced the old ones.
BINGO. The speedo started working again. It had previously been intermittent and then stopped working entirely, so anyone with a bad speedo that's not the sender and not a PCB track might want to try replacing the capacitors. They're both 25V - one is 10uF and the other is 100uF. Total cost was less than $2.
Thanks to StarCruiser for the initial information.
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Thanks for the additional info Lexx, 
it’s Worth suspecting capacitors as they are known to degrade with age.
2.5 years on this fix has been 100% successful.
it’s Worth suspecting capacitors as they are known to degrade with age. 2.5 years on this fix has been 100% successful.
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Bruce Raymond
New Member
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- Apr 18, 2018
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What a great post.. I'm having the same problems with my LJ78... going to follow these suggestions throughly.. will advise as to steps and results... 1 question.. as I can't source parts in central California can anyone give me some guidance on speed sensor??? Tried ordering a complete cluster from mega zip but they cancelled the order.. not available. oh well.
Cheers
Cheers
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+1 thanks to @StarCruiser for the detailed pics and procedure. My speedo also failed and after checking the VSS and cable this was the last place to look! My track was broken in a completely different place as you can see in the picture but after adding in a bridge its back to full working order.
Well spotted Rosy!
Mine just started jumping all over the place. 1995 HDJ81. I am currently trying to find service manual as this one is new to me. I hope this thread will be my solution. Where is the sensor? On transfer case? I knew I needed to get into dash to remove the reverse beeping signal.
