Thanks DEET! I haven’t had time to look at the rolled edge yet. If it doesn’t scare me to try opening it up, I am planning to try a transplant of the old guts to the new casing. If it does scare me, I’ll be getting in touch with you…

I have a little experience with this drill method, about 40 years ago a friend had a Honda CB900F Super Sport and was going to trade it in and wanted to take off about 2000 miles off the odometer (yes I know illegal & not the right thing to do) what he did was disconnect the speedometer cable at the wheel and put it in a hand held electric drill (no such thing as battery powered back then) and set it I think reverse and zip tied it on, to keep the drill from overheating he set a portable desk fan on it to keep it cool, I think it took him a couple days of running the drill for hours at a time to get the 2000 miles off, it ruined the speedometer cable, after buying a new speedometer cable the needle was bouncy for the first 20-30 m.p.h. on the speedometer, yes the odometer will go backwards and erase mileage but I think it also makes the needle go backward and gets forced against a stop which made the needle bouncy.

Now fast forward to 2022 I was in the same situation as the OP, I used a paint can opener to open up the speedometer, I first practiced on the damaged speedometer, it’s not that hard you just have to go slow and have patience, after swapping the complete internals and re-installing the chrome ring with channel locks with the jaws wrapped in electrical tape it came out almost unnoticeable, then with the rubber protector ring back in place it is definitely unnoticeable. Out of curiosity I wanted to reset the other speedometer back to 0’s after fiddling with the number wheels for a few minutes and I was about to give up, I’m not sure what I did but the 0’s all aligned up and I reassembled the zeroed out speedometer in the damaged can and taped it to the bike and connected the cable and gave it a test drive and all worked as it should. Anyone with a little patience and time can do it, it is not a difficult task, after you do it you will think I should have tried and done it a long time ago.

 

Thanks for the encouragement, Lizeec! I don’t have the new(old) one yet, but I’m going to give it a try. I’ll start on the old (old) one. If not comfortable with it, I’ll be reaching out to DEET!