560sl odometer not registering speedo works ok

[sully627]

driving this car and the speedo works fine however the odometer just quit registering,looked into the details and seen that there is a vehicle speed sensor located on the back of the speedo head, could this be the problem? i thought i would just replace the whole speedo head assembly use if i could find one. also the fuel gage only registers 1/2 tank when filling up also bounces to empty some times when driving. this is the first mercedes i've worked on so it's all pretty new to me, thanx for any help i can get, henry

[david s poole]

the vdo speedo has plastic gears and the plastic reverts to a very soft state and the gears chew themselves up.try speedometergears.com they can sell you the parts or fix it for you.

[las769]

IF you or someone else reset the trip od while moving you probably broke the plastic gears you can get a set for about 75.00 do a search on 126 speedo repair i can't find the link for the place that sell the gear set

[Randy]

Ooh, OOh! this happened to me this weekend; I thought it had something to do with trying the cruise control. I made about a 100 mile trip in the '86 420SEL; on the return I noticed the odo was not registering. I made a stop; when I resumed my return trip later, the odo worked again. Ghosts. I had tried the CC on the return trip to see if I could get it to work and it did, worked great all the way. Hummmm... randy

[crhenkel]

odometer gears stripped or broken. Buy new gears, pull instrument cluster and replace. very common to happen, gears get soft and break. Not a hard fix.

[sully627]

i want to thank you all for your help i will look into replacing the odometer gears and see if that works

[sgaar]

Look here: http://dieselgiant.com/repairyourodometer.htm

[Doktor Bert]

Hmmmmm....

All my plastic gears are good on my R107 unit and if I turn the pot metal gear by hand, both the Odo and Trip Odo advance, WTF????