Here’s a table for picking the correct gear. The speedometer drive gear is on the output shaft of the transmission, so (except for overdrive transmissions) it would turn at engine rpm in top gear. The speedometer drive gears typically had 7 or 8 teeth, the driven gears in the teens, so about a 2:1 reduction. If the engine’s turning 2000 rpm at 60 mph, the speedometer cable’s turning about 1000 rpm.
It seems unlikely that mileage was turned back by spinning the speedometer in reverse.
It seems unlikely that mileage was turned back by spinning the speedometer in reverse.
In some vehicles back in the 50’s and 60’s, yes you could turn back the OD by running in reverse.
My apologies @MG McAnick, you got the dimensions correct in the first place.
It would take 225 HOURS to add 27,000 miles to get to 115,000. I re-ran the calculations and found I got the dimensions mixed.
To add to this, I went out to the garage and grabbed my drill, a 1300 rpm battery model, pulled the speedo cable off my motorcycle (the only analog one left in my garage) and proceeded to give it a spin. 1300 rpm, on the bike, was right at 30 mph. A bit different than the 1000rpm=60mph but close enough to understand the magnitudes. Yeah, thousands of RPM to tens of mph and single digit mileage increases. Yeah, you have to leave that drill on for a very, very long time to roll over 27,000 miles!
@MikeInNH Yes, but that’s the premise of my rant. There is no way they could have turned the odometer backward or forward with a drill in the length of time that the customer was trying to make a deal.
I’m back in the office where I have the AutoWeek magazine. In his column, Jay states as though it were gospel truth, “I was not a mechanic. I did new car prep and what we called ‘odometer recalibration’ on used cars. One time a guy brought in a '64 Chevy he wanted to trade. The Chevy had 88,000 miles on it. We took his car out back, hooked up the electric drill— weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeh!! we spun the odometer backwards to 15,000. Happened all the time.”
It goes on with what I paraphrased the other day.
Obviously he is saying that the drill was used on the speedometer cable. Obviously he is saying it was turned BACK in a short period of time. I have no doubt that odometers were “clocked back” all the time, but since 1000 revolutions of the cable will deduct (or add) a mile in a minute, I’m saying there is no way the story is anything more than just a story. He is no longer a comedian. Since he’s writing for a respected automotive magazine, I’d have to say he’s a journalist. He needs to act like one.
I want to show the column to my 83 year old neighbor. He was in the car business, in one way or another, all of his working life. Sometimes he’s ‘holding court’ in his garage when I come by on my way home. IF he says odometers were done with a drill, I’ll believe it. Somehow I think he’ll know how it was done with a pick or wire.
The drill is an awfully slow method.
Usually one does a slight disassembly, removing the gang of numbers away from the drive gear just enough to spin them with a pick.
Then that good used speedo can be accurate for the car you’re putting it in.
A door label can also be used to state the mileage on the replacement odo, then the future reference is just math.
I think with a few gears I could make some thing that would make the cable turn much faster than the drill speed itself
The OP says in the story that they changed a possible trade-in from 88K to 15K. That would make the trade-in worth MORE. I don’t think the dealer would do that. Did someone get something backwards?
In 1968 my dad decided to trade in his 1966 Galaxie 500 he had owned since new. He put a lot of miles on his cars back then and would trade them every 2 years. Well, this time he had decided to trade it for a used 1967 at another lot instead of buying new. Something went wrong with the deal due to something the dealer did (I was young and don’t remember the details) and in a couple of weeks my dad gave the 1967 back and got his 1966 returned (with approx. 20,000 less miles on the odometer). Due to this and other stories I’ve heard I have wondered how many 1960’s and older cars that were considered “worn out” showing 100,000 miles had far more actual miles on them in reality. The 100,000 mile life expectation of the day could have been way off and undeserved.
The trade was based on 88K. The “recalibrator” jumped the gun. Sounds like an urban myth that Leno has attached himself to.
It does work. Not sure how long it’ll take with a drill. The other way is to spin it forward. Those OD’s only went to 100k miles, so you’d only have to spin it less the 40k miles forward to reach the desired goal.
@DavidL The dealer supposedly thought that they either owned the car, or would own it very soon. According to Mr Leno’s story, they mistakenly turned the mileage back before the deal was completed. When the customer brought the car BACK he got the better deal because they knew they’d done wrong. Had the customer complained to law enforcement, he’d have gotten nowhere. It was not illegal at the time. Had he complained to the newspapers, he might have made the dealer’s life difficult, or at least upset him a bit.
@wesw Even if you could spin the speedometer cable at five times the speed required to make the speedo register 60 MPH (300 MPH) you’d still need 243 hours to take off 73,000 miles, or 90 hours to roll it up to 15,000. It’s not going to happen that way while the customer is with his salesman. You’d probably also burn up the speedometer itself as well as the speedo cable, neither of which are designed for such speeds.
I never thought leno was funny anyway…
people make fun of the 70s but there were some things you could count on
carson would be funny…
Cronkite would be fair…
and 60 minutes struck fear in the hearts of fraudsters…
@wesw
“I never thought leno was funny anyway…”
I prefer Colbert and Jon Stewart
I guess that makes me liberal . . . since Colbert is only pretending to be a hard core conservative
Carson’s been gone for awhile, but I fondly remember some of his antics
He was really the king, and nobody else got that kind of respect, or had that staying power
Letterman’s been at it for awhile, but I don’t consider him in the same league as Carson
speaking of 60 minutes, I really miss Andy Rooney, Ed Bradley and Mike Wallace. Particularly Mike Wallace. Nobody could expose unsavory characters like him. If you had it coming, he made sure you fell flat on your face on national tv
it was funny with dan akroyd, jane curtain, and chevy chase.
but i think that many young people base their political views on what a couple jokesters say. its not exactly thoughtful discourse. i think that insulting political humor is divisive unless you make fun of everyone.
I will be anxious to see Colbert in a late night format. A good comedian is an equal opportunity offender. That’s why I always like Jay Leno. Anyone is fair game for a laugh, the way it should be. I like all the good comedians who have as much fun making fun of themselves as anyone else. Colbert is restricted by the political format of his show. It will be fun to watch for a while to see how well he branches out, hopefully he does. Colbert seems really sharp and quick witted, a definite attribute of all good ones. I hope I never really know his personal politics while he performs. That respects a comedians’s ability to choose funny topics.
Some may remember back in the 70s and 80s when GM vehicles used a transducer for the cruise control. That was mounted underhood on the left fender and used 2 speedometer cables.
It was quite common for people to easily unscrew one and accrue the miles without it showing up on the odometer.
A service advisor I used to work with put a lot of miles on his cars on the weekend; usually by heading to Texas to gamble and party. He would pop the transducer cable loose every Friday evening and regulated speed by the tach. He also kept his cars clean as a pin.
Dealers were always happy to allow a very handsome trade-in price on a 4 year old car with only 20k miles showing.
Little did they know it was more like 120k and no doubt that down the road whoever bought one of his old cars would be wondering why in the world so many problems existed at such low miles…
He even took his cars boondocking out in the sticks to go hunting. A bottle of Jack, box of 12 Gauge shells, and bird hunting in air conditioned comfort; cracking the window only to fire at birds.
I remember he came in one Monday morning talking about nailing 55 quail with half a box of shells; all of them shot on the ground as a covey and way more than the 10 allowed by law.
Lot of illegalities there but not an issue with him… 
I finally caught my elderly neighbor in his garage this evening. He had been out of commission for a while due to some surgery. Anyway, I asked him about the Jay Leno column in Autoweek. I read the part where Mr Leno said they turned the odometer back with a drill. His first comment was “NO WAY, it would take a year”. He went on to describe a job he had in the late '40s working for a local Studebaker dealer. He was a teenager at the time, somewhat like Jay Leno. He was at least an accessory to odometer recalibration. He would REMOVE a speedometer from a trade in, and hand it to the used car “manager”. The manager would TAKE IT APART and “adjust” the odometer. NO DRILLS were used.
That, my friends, was how it was done.
My neighbor had an interesting career in the automotive field. I had thought he was 83. He was born in 1929. He’ll be 85 in October. He’d told me some of his story before, but gave me more details this evening. He worked locally for a couple of Studebaker dealers, Nash, Packard, Nash again, and finally a Chevrolet dealer that kept him for about 15 years before the dealership burned to the ground, killing two firemen. He was their body shop manager most of that time. That dealer rebuilt down the street under another name, and he went back to work until he “retired” almost 20 years ago. Retirement didn’t fit well, so he took a supposedly part time job as an insurance adjuster. As it turned out, he did a lot of out of town work on that job, collecting per diem to stay over night. The insurance company was glad to pay it, but he stayed in a nice motor home that they were paying for without realizing it.
I must make a comment on this thread. Many years ago, (I’m a definite inhabitant of Geezerdom), I had a little side business where I had a route of a few car dealers that i visited periodically, for the purpose or “fixing the clocks” on their used car inventory (the federal odometer tampering law had not yet been enacted). I was called a “pick artist” as the tool of choice for this work was a set of dental picks. The odometer was accessed through the cardboard tubes used back then to get the illumination of the dash lamps to the appropriate instruments. you’d poke your pick through the tube and then either between the wheels or on the side of the leftmost digit and adjust accordingly. There were times this was not possible so I tried the drill method. It was way too slow. I then tried my Dremel Tool which was much faster (35,000 rpm). Not bad, but there was a problem, it only turned clockwise. To stand there and roll the clock past 99,999 and then forward to the desired number would have been too time consuming. I was debating on building a clockwork gearbox to turn the clockwise rotation to counter clockwise, but thought better of it. On those rare occasions, i’d just remove the speedometer head.
interesting…