Is Your Ford Odometer on the Blink?   by Harvey Sitzlar

in Autos    (submitted 2008-07-31)

If you own a 1999 - 2003 full size F-series Ford pickup truck or sport utility vehicle with a digital odometer, chances are pretty good that you have observed some strange behavior from your odometer readout. These vehicles (listed below) have a lot in common when it comes to digital odometers. The thing they have in common is a circuit board with defective solder joints. Over time, certain solder joints on these boards begin to deteriorate and eventually crack, resulting in intermittent and erratic behavior of the odometer display.

At times the odometer may work fine. At other times it may grow dim or extinguish completely. It may stay blank permanently or it may illuminate and extinguish randomly like it has a mind of its own. Normally, you can expect it to be most problematic during the summer months or on hot humid days. Sometimes a good smack on the dash will revive the odometer for a while. Eventually the problem will continue to get worse until the odometer finally remains dark all the time, no matter how hard you try to revive it.

Now that it is dead, what can you do? What SHOULD you do? You might consider options that range from taking it to your Ford dealer or local mechanic; replacing the instrument cluster with a new or used one; or having the odometer repaired at a speedometer repair shop.

If you choose any of these options, be prepared to reach deeply into your wallet because each of these options will cost much more than you expect. The dealer will charge $600 or more, because the dealer's only recourse for this problem is to replace the entire instrument cluster.

Replacing the instrument cluster yourself will also cost several hundred dollars because there are hidden costs such as reprogramming of the odometer and the PATS system (and paying labor for someone to remove and install the cluster if you don't know how to do it or have a kind friend who is willing to do it for you.)

Many owners decide to 'just live with the problem' and do nothing. In this case, doing nothing at all may prove to be more costly than all of the other options combined.

The specific vehicles affected by the fading, blinking or blank odometer problem include: 1999 F150, 1999 F250, 1999 F350, 1999 Explorer, 1999 Expedition, 2000 F150, 2000 F250, 2000 F350, 2000 Explorer, 2000 Expedition, 2001 F150, 2001 F250, 2001 F350, 2001 Explorer, 2001 Expedition, 2002 F150, 2002 F250, 2002 F350, 2002 Explorer, 2002 Expedition, 2003 F150, 2003 F250, 2003 F350, 2003 Explorer, and the 2003 Expedition.

If you own one of the listed vehicles, don't despair! There is one other repair option that you may not have yet considered. You can actually fix the intermittent odometer problem yourself. You can find discussions about this problem on the Internet. Just check out the various automotive and truck forums.

If you have a few hours to research these forums, you can probably learn enough to fix the problem without spending any money at all. But be sure you read everything you can find about the repair, because as you will find in the forums, there are some rather expensive lessons that were learned the hard way by inexperienced shade tree mechanics who attempted the repair without having enough information to do the job right.

On the other hand, there's an old saying that 'you only get what you pay for'. If searching through Internet sites for free information is not your cup of tea and you would prefer to invest a few dollars to obtain all the information instead of spending many hours sifting for tidbits of information across endless automotive forums, then you have come to the right place. Only minutes from now, you can have in your hands a copy of the ONLY repair manual in existence that was written specifically to show the owners of the above vehicles how to repair their own defective digital odometer. Even if you have no prior experience, you CAN repair your own odometer with this manual.

The manual takes you through the entire repair process in an easy step-by-step manner that will have your odometer working like new with only a couple of hours of your time invested. The manual is detailed and well-documented, with illustrations and photos taken by the author as he performed the repair on his own vehicle. In the amount of time that it would take just to locate the forums that discuss this problem, you can have your odometer repaired. The choice is yours. Whatever your choice, you DO need to have your odometer repaired. Find out why you should not ignore this problem and get all the other details about the cause, symptoms and repair options at http://www.odometer-repair.com.

About the Author

Harvey Sitzlar is a retired Naval Flight Officer. He is an electrical engineer, a graduate of Auburn University and spent 16 years with the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in Knoxville before retiring in 2006.