My car suddenly started making an noise in the dashboard that sounds like a dry speedometer cable or stripped gears in a odometer. Is the speedometer mechanical? What about the odometer?

 

It's electronic, but as you can see, there is a stepper motor in there running a mechanical odometer. There's no speedo cable.

 

odometer gears regularly fail. you can find the replacement gears on eBay. only special tool required is a #8 torx bit screwdriver to open up the gauge cluster. Also a good time to replace any burn out dash bulbs...

 

I looked on youtube and the replacement of the gears looks pretty straight forward. I checked IPD and the gears are really cheap.

 

Well the source of the sound finally let it's self known. I was driving today and it was making the noise then suddenly made a bang then was a little quieter. When I parked and got out about half the rubber strip at the top of the windshield had pealed back from one end and was blowing in the wind. Now I need to see if it can be re attached or if the entire windshield needs to be reset.

 

How funny! My 98 S70 did that, and it sounded like the noise was coming right out of the top of the dash. I saw it in a parking lot, after 3 or 4 days of it being really loud, and then figured out what it was.

 

This was the same thing, loud and sounded like gears in the dashboard. How did you fix it? Did you have to reset the windshield or were ?you able to reattach the trim?

 

No, I just thew it away. The windshield is fine for now.