david3921 , thanks for the idea. A bit over kill on my end but it worked to see all the gizmos turning.
I'm going to venture a guess that the root cause of the speedo gear stripping was old grease that had turned into hard shellac type stuff and froze the gear axle which allowed the cable driven speedo gear to wear the other gear and maybe sloppy Chinese tolerances so they couldn't mesh together anymore ????
Box store air cleaner another good idea, I'll use the original for now to get it broke in , but keep an eye out for a future replacement when I'm in stores.
The underside of air cleaner looks just like the top side in pic above except the center concave part is punched out to suck the air thru and match the oblong hole in the air cleaner housing. rj
