Speedo Stuck On Zero
As I was riding along on the straight the other day I noticed my speedo had dropped to zero and stopped registering after a short burst of accelerating. On the side of the road I detached both ends of the cable (from the back of the speedo and from the front wheel hub) and determined that:
- The cable was in one piece and turning easily
- The gear in the front wheel was turning with the wheel
- The speedo was registering movement of the cable
I put it all back together again and rode off - the speedo registered up to about 30km/h then stopped working again.
This all seemed a bit mysterious (given that all parts seemed to be independantly working).
With a bit of advice from my local Honda service shop I determined that it was likely to be one of two problems:
- The gear in the wheel hub was slipping
- The speedo was worn on the inside causing the top of the cable to slip
The second of these being the less complex to access I tried wrapping a bit of tape around the top of the cable - with complete success.
I felt a bit uneasy about bits of tape wearing off and clagging up the cable so my final solution was to grab some shrink tube from my local electronics store (rated up to 125 degrees celcius so clearly not going to melt too easily) and shrink-wrapped the top of the speedo cable. This fitted snugly into the speedo and I now have a working speedo again.
Postscript
I haven't seen a brand new cable and speedo so am not sure how snug the fitting is when new but the additoin of the shrink wrap had made the performance of the speedo much more steady. As the speedo was clearly close to wearing the speedo arm tended to jump around a bit when the riding was rough - this has now largely stopped happening.
I will need to pull the speedo cable out again after a few hundred kilometres to check how the shrink tubing is wearing.