odometer acting very strange!!

[Flame]

Took our 98 concourse on a 600 mile trip. Odometer started at 39,965. Happen to look at the odometer a ways down the road and told my wife it's reading 39999 and just fixing to hit the 40000 mile mark. Well it never changed!! It seemed to have got hung up on 39999. Luckily we were using our gps so we know how far we had driven. The "trip meter" was also stuck. Kind of agrivated me because we took so much pride in the fact everything worked on this rig. We just decided to use our gps for all our milage info until I could get home and maybe replace the odometer. Well......several miles down the road I happened to look down and noticed the odometer was working again and it kept working the rest of the trip!!! Any ideas?? Do you think when it tries to change to 50000 it will do the same thing?? Best we figured we had only gone about 30 more miles when it started working again. Weird huh??

[Blue~Go]

I've turned over at 50k, 60k, and 70k and never seen any hang up (I get a kick out of watching it turn over, so I was looking at it). I'd presume it needs repair.

I don't know how these odometers work, but on a car I used to have it was quite common to break a tooth on the odometer gear if you re-set the tripmeter while moving. Replaced a couple of them on that car. So now I don't do that (even though the Ford may work completely differently, I just don't know and it's an easy precaution to take).

If it were me, I'd be wondering if the mileage overall is correct. Have you run a Carfax? Sometimes they show the previous maintenance and mileage, and you might be able to get a feel for whether the odometer started acting up at some specific point in the past, and therefore estimate the actual mileage.

You could then see if it's possible to adjust it when you have it repaired. It was easy to do on my previous car, so, like you, I kept track of the mileage between when it stopped working correctly and when I replaced the odometer gear, and "turned it up" to the correct mileage (how many people ADD mileage to their vehicle ). But in that case it wasn't "sticky" -- it just stopped working entirely. I'd also owned the car for years, so I knew the baseline mileage was correct.

I was able to buy a better made odometer gearset from a place called, IIRC, "odometer gears." But if the Ford is not notorious for breaking gears, there may be no need (or no existence) of an aftermarket gear. Or maybe it's something else completely that makes it act up. I will say I have not noticed this to be a common repair in my reading, but then I wasn't looking for it.

If no-one here knows, you might check over at Ford Truck forum. They have a sub-forum just for E-series vans and it's an active forum.

[b6fischer]

Yes. It's common. Southern Electronics right near me in Richmond, Va and they are odometer masters. Here's a link to a discussion.

https://www.ford-trucks.com/forums/9273 ... meter.html

[Blue~Go]

Thanks for correcting me, bfischer. Well, at least a common problem usually has a fix.

[Blue~Go]

I went and read that thread and it actually does sound at least slightly like my previous car in that a plastic gear breaks. On that car it was a circular gear (vs. apparently a worm gear on the Ford) and it would just stop dead once a tooth broke off. And in my case a stronger nylon gear was made by an aftermarket company. But similar in that a new plastic gear solved the problem. Cool that the place you mentioned has them.

Again, I don't know if this is the same as my previous car (not a Ford), but on that car it was clearly hard on it to re-set the tripmeter while in motion (that's how it broke actually). So once you get it fixed you might choose to only reset the tripmeter when you are not moving (that's what I do, unless or until I find out for sure that it doesn't matter on a Ford).

BG

PS: This thread over on the truck forum might also be helpful. JWA typically knows his stuff and this shows the guts of the cluster.

https://www.ford-trucks.com/forums/1157 ... atomy.html

[chin_k]

Some people would leave it alone so that after a few dozens cross country trips and twenty years later, it will still says 39999, and others would think that it hardly leave your garage....

I have the same problem with these mechanical odometers, but on a '84 Chevy. I did not bother to fix it, since it had already reset itself to "00000" twice (the odometer only have 5 digits.) The odometer reads a little bit more than 10k miles when I got rid of it, and the buyer was very disappointed when I told him about everything I know.

[b6fischer]

Did you get it fixed?

[Flame]

I am hoping that because mine just stuck at 39999 when all digits were trying to turn at once it won't show any problems again until at least 49999. It is still working fine now and I will take everyones advise and not hit the tripset until I am stopped. Thankfully we were running a gps and I have accurate milage and something to compare odometer to.