Mine is out now, and what I did was before it came out, I ran at various posted speeds (25. 35, 45 55) in third and fourth gear and noted the tach (RPM) reading and gear.
I then made a card showing this data and placed it over the speedo area.
Works well enough to avoid tickets.
Anthony'89 Syncro GL (Hidalgo)

--- On Tue, 4/19/11, Rocket J Squirrel <camping.elliott@GMAIL.COM> wrote:

From: Rocket J Squirrel <camping.elliott@GMAIL.COM>
Subject: Re: Broken Odometer
To: vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM
Date: Tuesday, April 19, 2011, 9:33 AM

On Tue, 2011-04-19 at 03:51 -0700, Stephen Grisanti wrote:

> Incidentally, if you pull your instrument cluster to send off the a
>� vendor for repair or just to let it languish on your bench until you
>� get around to working on it, the van will run fine without it.� At
>� least my '87 does.

That� . . . that sounds really weird. But it makes sense, I guess. The
van doesn't "know" if the cluster is present, the cluster only displays
things that are going on with the van. I reckon a GPS would stand in
quite nicely for the missing speedo.
--
Rocky J Squirrel