When I bought my car the speedometer didn't work. Like the OP, when I looked in the transmission hole that the cable goes into I could see the drive gear on the output shaft and the teeth didn't look to be damaged. Everything I checked seemed to be ok, so I finally pulled the transmission from the car and took off the tailshaft. I know this can be done with the trans in the car but it's a whole lot easier with the trans out and it isn't hard at all to pull the trans, so that's the way I went.
So that was when I found the problem. I was able to slip the drive gear off the output shaft with very little resistance.
The T5 in my car must have originally been from a later model that used an electronic speedo. See that square toothed "gear"on the output shaft? That's used to trigger the sensor for an electronic speedo and isn't present on older T5's that use a mechanical speedo. Since my T5 wasn't setup for a mechanical speedo it had no hole in the output shaft for the speedo drive gear retainer. Someone had simply slid the drive gear onto the output shaft without a retainer and it had slid back on the shaft just enough that it didn't engage the gear on the end of the speedo cable. And that's why the speedo didn't work.
As the poster above mentioned I was afraid to attempt drilling a hole in the shaft for fear of ruining it. What I did was smear some red loctite on the drive gear retainer, then slid the gear and retainer into their proper position, making sure I forced the gear far enough forward into the retainer so that the little tang on the top side of the retainer snapped over the drive gear holding it firmly to the retainer.
Of course the tang on the bottom side of the retainer was meant to drop into a hole in the output shaft that wasn't there so it kind of bent back when I forced the gear on. I let the whole assembly setup overnight and reinstalled everything the next day. The speedo now worked! Red loctite is supposed to be good to 500* F and you better hope your transmission fluid never gets that hot.
Here's a pic of the drive gear in it's proper position after my repair.
I ran the car that way for several years and when I had to tear down the T5 later I was able to knock the drive gear off with a couple sharp blows and no damage was done to the shaft. When I re-assembled it I again used the red loctite method and it's been working fine to this day.
Since the OP has checked everything else I'm thinking he may be having the same problem I did and if so I can verify this method will fix it.
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