ok so my speedo decided to stop working the other day and then i realized that the trip meter and the odometer also do not work. so this let me know that whatever is wrong must be from the speedometer wire. so i spent a few days huntings down a wire and installing it but now it still doesnt work so this means only one thing, that the gears inside the tranny that spin the speedo wire must be bad, but i just need to know if it is possible to fix this on my own, and also how do i get at these gears? if i cant do it then i have to take it to the dealer and that will put back my 5.7 tpi swap backa few months...and thats unacceptable. please help

 

Hopefully someone else can chime in here... I'm not sure if your year of car came with a true speedo cable to drive the gague or if it had just a VSS which went to the ECM and then the ECM drove the speedo electrically.

While it's possible that the gears inside the trans are stripped it's very very unlikely. I don't recall ever stripping a set with either type of speedo.

I've had several speedos go dead on me (including the odo) on cars with an ECM-driven gague. Sometimes it was the VSS itself, more often the gague inside the cluster jsut died and I installed a rebuild gague cluster to fix it.

If it's got a cable then the most common cause is the drive cable itself has broken internally.

 

On a 5spd 89 Camaro, you need to remove the transmission, and remove the tailhousing. Not terribly bad, but when you disassemble things you need to remember a couple things. Once you drive down the rollpin for the offset block holding it to the upper shift rail, you MUST remove the tailhousing and remove it. Also, don't yank on the tailhousing and twist on the upper shift rail such that it moves the rail around & discombobulates the shift interlock mechanism. Other than that, it's all nuts & bolts.

Not tough to do, the parts aren't expensive, but the shift interlock can be frustrating if you aren't familiar with an internal shift rail trans.
-Matthew