944 Odometer Behaviors

[redhorse]

I am wondering if someone has insight into this 944's odometer behavior. First, just bought the car a day ago, and drove it 700 miles home so am just learning all about it (my first 944) I know about broken plastic gear issues on old Porsches, but that doesn't appear to be the cause on this car. It is a 1990 cabriolet (serial #147) with now questionable mileage (probably 100-120K).

After driving about 125 miles I unintentionally reset the trip odometer. It was unintentional because I did not know the secret reset button, but learned when moving the air vents and activated the reset switch. At that point, the trip odometer continued to operate normally, however; for the next 20-30 miles the regular odometer went "crazy". The 1s and 10s digits did not move. The 100s digit moved at the speed of the 1/10ths digit on the trip odometer, and the 1000s and 10000s digits moved faster than they should. Then all of a sudden, all of the digits starting working correctly. However, at this point, the odometer had advanced about 14,000 miles during the abnormal behavior! Again, this happened over a highway drive of between 20-30 miles. For the remainder of the trip the odometer worked correctly, but have not again tried resetting the trip odometer.

Any ideas about the cause/fix for this problem? Thanks.

[nh_hillwalker]

You're probably all right now. But NEVER press the reset when the car is in motion. Many odometer gears have been stripped that way. The electrical resetting solenoid in the cluster is strong enough to strip teeth off the little plastic gear.

[Odometergears]

Redhorse,

It's an urban myth that you can't hit your reset while you are rolling. Your gear inside the speedo head broke because it is made of rubber and soaked in oil. It melted. Call us and we can fix your problem easily. We have been supplying the world with replacement odometer gears for the past 10 years.