I initially thought I had a broken cable because the speedo just stopped working. I pulled the cable end from the tcase and hooked up a drill, spun it up and nothing on the speedo side. I pulled the cluster and spun it again, the cable turns. I took a small screwdriver and placed it in the square drive hole for the speedo cable on the back of the cluster and it registers. drove the 4runner without the cluster installed and the cable turns, once it's hooked back up to the cluster, nothing...any ideas? what am I missing here?

95 4runner SR5, 3.0 auto

 

grab hold of the end of the speedo end of the cable with a pair of vise-grips, and hold it firmly. slowly turn the other end with a pair of pliers or whatever. any resistence? if not, the cable end is probably mostly disconnected, so it appears to spin, yet is unable to turn the speedo mechanism.

 

funny, I was just thinking about that; maybe it was broken inside and just the fact that 2 broken ends are sitting against the other that they spin with each other but once there is some resistance like from the speedo, only one broken piece spins. thank you!

 

let us know what you find, in any event.

 

Yep, that's exactly what happened. the metal spiral "cord" snapped off where it meets the plastic square drive that inserts into the speedo. I don't suppose just the inner cable is replaceable without replacing the entire housing and such is it?

 

Hard for me to imagine it would be worth the $85 to try a patch like that.
https://www.toyotapartsdeal.com/oem/...710-35490.html

 

true, but I wasn't sure if such a thing existed as just the core cable. heard it was kind of a pain to work around the ebrake cable that has to rethread through the plate on the floorboard/firewall

 

back in the old days, that was exactly how to replace a speedo cable. i mean for 40s, 50s, and 60s vehicles. but more recently, it seems that the way to fix the issue is to replace the entire assembly, meaning the cable and the sheath, with the ferrules/hardware attachments.