I thought this was impossible...?

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Looks like I'm late to this party..

I can see both Genuine and Iffy uses for this. Genuine being 'oh bugger, my clocks gone'. Do I pay new part price from the stealer or go second hand? hmm... I would go second hand if I knew I could get the mileage to match the vehicle (that goes for both Up and Down adjustments). So in general - its the application of the knowledge that dictates whether it should be seen as good or bad. If more people know how the 'blck hat' people conduct themselves it makes it easier for normal folk to check things are correct. For one I've learnt something with this info I didn't know to look for before.

As with regards newbies repeat posting... that may have something to do with being a newbie. Everyone has a slightly different take on what's going wrong don't they... and you can't always find the same fault in the same way just by reading through old posts. In addition a lot of the posts are now quite old and therefore fixes may have changed or parts become available that where not recognised.

Unless you have a sub section for each part of the car... you can not pool the info; I;ve sometimes come across a fix in an unrelated titled post.
 
I used to repair Volvo instrument panels for a garage, where the mileage was involved, I always set it to zero, provided a note of the actual mileage and stencilled the same on the back of the instrument panel. Garage bloke was a good man, he used to then put the mileage the clock was changed in the service book. Of course that would not stop some a'hole in the future trying it on.
 
This is an old thread but worth it's weight in gold. Having just had my instrument cluster changed by a garage the Kms went from those at purchase in 2019 of 230000 to 310000 after the 'pinnacle' instrument cluster change. I was losing sleep and feeling very stupid until I read this thread today. VERY INFORMATIVE ! There is yet hope I can retrieve my original kilometrage, it does look a bit complicated and a bit beyond my capabilities but, I can now sleep knowing it's possible AND PERFECTLY LEGAL !! So MANY thanks to all on here.
 
I considered long and hard before eventually deciding to post up on this thread. As many of you will be all to aware of the criticism i typically face on every post i seem to make and sadly this now means i am really now a quite infrequent visitor here and am certainly quite select on offering any further contribution to this forum.

However i certainly cannot stand by and watch any member potentially be ripped of for the want of bit a little bit of the knowledge i happen to posses.

The information i am about to provide may well have been of been of very high value to anyone of iffy tendencies 10 years ago, but the P38 is now quite an old vehicle and anyone buying one, will and should certainly consider its condition over and above whatever the odometer might show.

The Mileage of a P38 is indeed kept in both the BeCM and Instrument cluster and is often stored as the KM equivalent (Simply multiply the miles by .6214 to get the KM's) I really now forget which the P38 uses. If you change either up or down, the partner system will eventually auto update to whichever holds the larger of the two values, leaving those swapping either around with only all parts having the largest value in them.

This often happens instantly, otherwise, you may see a message in the Ipacks screen saying "ODO UPDATE" until it does. There is a diagnostic function "Odo re sync" to pre force this "to the highest value" synchronisation on demand.

However there is a very top secret trick that this ebay guy is exploiting with his so called Magic Instrument pack and i discovered over 10 years ago.
While the BeCM keeps it's value inside a secured microprocessor, that to date only we have been able to crack and provide direct access to, the Instrument Pack stores it's value in a totally industry standard parallel eeprom that can easily be read and edited by even the most basic of programmers. It really is not rocket science as the only thing this EEPROM chip contains is this value.

You have to de solder this chip to do this. But it is old through hole technology,
So that ain't any problem to anyone armed with little more than a regular solder sucker.

Normal protocol dictates that you disconnect the vehicles battery, remove the ipack, then its EEPROM, edit its contents then refit the EEPROM, the Ipack and reconnect the battery. But then as explained, the Ipack will just update to whatever the BeCM had in it. Putting you right back to square one.

However, the big secret, and the real trick to this Guys offering is that if you temporarily refit the Instrument pack without the EEPROM chip in at all, and power up the vehicle, the BeCM magically resets its count to zero. So the loan Magic Instrument pack is nothing more that one without an EEPROM chip in.

Having then edited the instrument packs EEPROM to whatever value you wish and then re fitting it, the BeCM will update itself from zero to whatever the Instrument pack has in it.

Beyong my ken but it occurs to me there might be 2 other options?

1) scrape any lacquer off the legs of the instrument cluster eeprom chip and press the reader socket against the legs enough to read it.

2) if you're replacing the instrument cluster with a lower mileage one you could scratch the circuit of the old one to break the circuit the BECM uses to check eeprom chip thereby setting BECM to zero and then swap the new one in and the BECM would take the new value. I can see this being useful if swapping from kph to mph.
 
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