K100RS Speedo

[Lawrence]

The speedo on my K100RS worked only intermittently when I bought the bike.  No surprise there; they are infamous for giving grief to their owners.  In the course of bringing the bike up to what I consider road-worthiness, I opened the instrument, cleaned the connections within with contact cleaner, and put a light smear of silicone grease on them.  I also cleaned the sensor in the rear drive and the connector in the wiring about mid-bike. The speedo came back to life.  Now, depressingly soon after that, the needle is again falling to zero when the bike is at speed.  A loving whack on the left side of the instrument case sometimes wakes the speedo up, sometimes not. 
Is this the future of my life with the K-bike?  :dunno  Does the speedo typically go pear shaped every few months? Jeeze Louise, the Motometer instruments on the Airheads will run for tens of thousands of miles after you "repair" them....   

[Inge K.]

A very common source to speedometer problems is a three pin connector at the rearside of the speedometer.
Have a look in this thread.

Inge K.

[frankenduck]

Click here: Fix a flaky or inoperative K bike speedometer

[Lawrence]

Thank you gentlemen, for the quick replies.  I did the maintenance/repair on the instruments as outlined in the tech posts.  The exception is that I used contact cleaner and not DeOxit.  My question really comes down to this: Is this a procedure I can expect to do every 6 months -- even though the bike is in a pretty dry climate?  If that is the case, I'm inclined to just say screw it, and wait for that magical instrument wmax351 is working on.  If the odo/speedo feature is incorporated into it, then no worries!  :2thumbup:

[frankenduck]

If you cleaned the pins well and twisted them a little before reinsertion then it should work without any need to do it again.

[Rick G]

You may have to fix it again in about another 25 years but it usually works well.

[Lawrence]

Okay, I'm game for another go.  This time with DeOxit and plenty of twistin' ... I hope to avoid the shoutin' later.

[Lawrence]

I restored the speedo to working conditions yesterday, but created a new problem in the process  :embarass:
Instead of contact cleaner, this time I used DeOxit, but none too carefully.  Contact cleaner evaporates pretty much immediately; DeOxit does not.  I now have liquid in the housing.  It looks like the only way to remove it is to pull all the guts completely out of the instrument housing. It seems to do that, I must remove the odometer reset knob.   I can't work out how to do that and I will surly break something expensive if I keep fiddling around with it in this state of ignorance.  :loopy:
Is it necessary to remove that knob in order to separate the instruments from their case? If so, how is that done?
TIA

[frankenduck]

You do not need to remove the odo knob.  Just pull it out until it's spring is all of the way compressed and the "guts" can be removed.  There's a notch in the side of the speedo faceplate for it to pass through.

[Lawrence]

Thank you Doctor.  I think I have 'em sorted now.   :2thumbup: