The failure is a "moving apart" of some of the moving parts.� One of the driven gears has a habit of slipping away from its driving gear.� Lots of info on fixing this available here and on some threads (with pictures) on thesamba.com.� It happened to the odo on my '87 Westy and after a couple of tries I was able to get it working again.

The instrument cluster comes out and apart pretty easily.� The toughest part is the lack of finger room when actually working on the odo.

Stephen

--- On Mon, 4/18/11, Daniel Rotblatt <d.rotblatt@VERIZON.NET> wrote:

From: Daniel Rotblatt <d.rotblatt@VERIZON.NET>
Subject: Broken Odometer
To: vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM
Date: Monday, April 18, 2011, 12:50 AM

I'm looking at buying a westy.� Two out of four of the vans I am
looking at (or going to look at) have broken odometers (1982-86
vanagons), and a couple of others in that year range had broken
odometers.� Obviously, there is some common part that fails in them.
I was wondering what this was, and if it was an easy fix.

Dan
L.A., CA
Soon to be a Westy owner