No speedometer or Odometer P0500 code

Hello everyone! This is my first post here as I feel I have ran down a rabbit hole, and have no more ideas on my issue at hand. So I have a 97 Tacoma 3.4 4x4 and about a year ago now my Speedometer, and Odo stopped working completely. Now everything else in my cluster works great. So initially it gave a p0500 code for a VSS. I ended up replacing the VSS but no change with the Speedo. So I Investigated and talked to some mechanics I knew. After some digging I have realized my truck had cable driven Speedometer. So I unscrewed the cable from the side of the transmission and made sure the gearbox inside the transmission was spinning. So we jacked the back wheels up and sure enough the cog inside was spinning. After that I wanted to check and see if the cable was spinning. So I took the cluster out and reconnected the cable and it was also spinning behind the dash. At this point I was very confused. So eventually I took the cluster out once again and did an entire tear down of the cluster. My hope was that maybe the gear box inside the cluster was seized with old grease, or the gears had just broken the teeth. So cleaned the entire gearbox with parts cleaner and rebuilt it. After that I spun the gearbox by hand and it moved freely. So thinking I had fixed my issue I put everything back together took it for a test drive. The speedometer would slightly twitch, but would never read above 5mph. After this rebuild I started noticing a clicking behind my cluster like the cable was spinning but the gears were possibly broken. So now I am stuck again hence why I’m posting here. Any ideas to fix this would be awesome. I’m leaning to needing a new gearbox for the cluster but am still unsure why I’m getting the VSS code when it’s a new sensor and the cluster is cable driven.

 

Not sure which sensor you replaced but the Vehicle Speed Sensor for the PCM is on the back of the speedometer in the Instrument Cluster so if your speedometer doesn't work it's no surprise your getting a P0500 code.

 

Makes a lot of sense why nothing I did fixed anything. I asume that requires just a replacement of the whole cluster then?