Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums General Troubleshooting Speedo making noise and going nuts

I've got a 1995 Contour GL, V6, AT, built in '94. On the day it turned 110,000 miles, the speedometer has started failing. Here are the symptoms:

First it started with just an audible clicking sound from the area of the speedo in the instrument cluster. It's a fast click sound like a baseball card in the spokes of a bicycle. It gets faster or slower with the speed of the car. At very slow creeping speed the clicks are slow and distinct, and at highway speeds it blurs into basically a buzz sound. The sound correlates with the speed of the car, not the engine RPMs shown on the tach. Initially this sound was the only symptom.

Then after a few dozen miles, the speedo needle itself started freaking out. The noise is now louder and the needle swings all over the place. It will swing around in roughly the direction of the correct speed but is essentially unusable for reading a true speed.

The odometers (main and trip) DO still work, as do the other gauges. I've seen no other electrical problems either. I've seen messages in the archive from people where both the speedo and odometer fail at the same time due to the VSS or cable or other electrical fault, but didn't see any reports of just the speedo failing and making this mechanical noise I'm hearing.

(Oh yeah, I'd hope not to spend very much fixing this. I hope to trade it in when my new Jaguar X-Type arrives later THIS MONTH! Really!)

Any ideas, anybody? Would be much appreciated.

You need a new speedo cable since you have mech not electrical speedometer.

UPDATE: Now the speedometer and odometers have failed completely. The speedo is stuck at zero and the odometers don't advance. But at least the annoying noise is gone.

QUESTION: Does the speedo cable run anywhere near the ATX dipstick? Yesterday before the speedo started failing, I had checked the ATX fluid. It's a tight reach in there to the dipstick between some cables and tubes, but I can't imagine that I could have damaged it just by reaching through there. That would be a pretty fragile cable if so. Any ideas?

If the clicking has stopped chances are the cable is now broken.Start at the trans end where the drive comes out of the trans and work up....

UPDATE: took it to my dealer and got it fixed. Apparently there are *two* speedometer cables which were bad and were replaced:

F5RZ-17260-A ($74.68)
F5RZ-17260-D ($21.97)

Now the speedo works, and this also fixed a problem which I'd thought was unrelated. The transmission had been having a problem that felt like a harsh shift or slippage at a certain gear and acceleration. I asked the shop to check this out too, and they report it was caused by the 2nd failed speedo cable which was confusing the powertrain computer. So that's fixed now too.