[alfa] 1986 spider speedo drive

[Michael Tiefenback <tiefenback@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The speedo cable wasn't being reliably driven.  Pulling it in and out a
few mm would cause it to transition between driven and free-spinning in
the speedo feed.  New cable, fully square.  I'd bashed the old one
(probably it was perfectly good, but I'd replaced it) to flatten it a
bit and see whether in that state it would stay driven all the time.  No
dice.  Because I don't like taking things apart without spares in hand,
I ordered a drive gear from A.P.E.  Second thing I 've ordered from then
and both have been perfectly good items at reasonable prices.  They said
drive gears came in two flavors across the Spider production run and
mixing them causes the small drive gear to fail, so they wanted to sell
me both driver and driven gears.  OK.  The driven gear (from an '87?)
was the same as in the '86, as expected.  But the inner nominally square
section chamber was apparently rounded out enough to cause the drive to
fail.  The "new" one is working fine, seemingly proper calibration on
both odo and speedo heads in instrument panel (yay!).  I'll be looking
into getting the failed one revamped at a local speedo shop.

Wanted to share the good outcome and fact (reported to me exactly once
when I asked) that the speedo drive gear can be replaced from under the
car without pulling the tranny or cracking the case.  I pulled the
tranny support off and was about to replace the tranny mount (had it in
hand and ready) when I found it was not easy to remove and looked
_just_fine_.  Isn't it amazing how things start looking more serviceable
when they can't be removed.  But in truth, this one looked really nice
with no tears in the rubber.

Michael
--
to be removed from alfa, see /bin/digest-subs.cgi
or email "unsubscribe alfa" to majordomo@domain.elided