HVAC Actuator Fix...

[Warstud]

I was getting a clicking noise from under the dash which indicates a bad HVAC Actuator. The teeth on the gears eventually break off or strip and it wont work right anymore. Well after removing it and splitting it apart I noticed a tooth on the drive gear was broke. I also noticed that more than half the drive gear doesn't even come in contact with the blue gear. So I ended up sliding the gear off the silver metal part with the hole in it and rotating the gear 180 degrees.....pressed it back on...put it all back together and no more clicking. Cost= a couple hours.

 

[earlyre]

You're lucky you can do that. I've replaced 3 of these in fords, having seen that trick on GM sites, because the way Ford makes them, the gears will only fit one way...The pins are "keyed"

My nephew's school's"tech club" has a couple 3d printers, I asked him to look into printing a replacement gear... He was told it would cost him around$70... Which is what the whole unit costs at the dealer, (I get them around $30 on Amazon)

 

[dishdude]

I had no idea those actuators were so complex inside.

 

[earlyre]

Here's Photos of the Dorman replacement unit out of my Sable(which broke after a year, and was replaced with an official motorcraft part)

 

[bdcardinal]

I hate those. There are some vehicles with 4 or more and our cataloging just calls them "blend door actuator" and some will not say where they go. They all use a 19E616 callout, so we either need to hope that the illustration is clear and we can pick it out or get the number off the old one.

 

[JetStar]

I built a tester for Delco back in the 80's for those. They work very similar to an RC airplane / Car / Boat servo. Back then the position demand was an analog voltage from the dash head unit. RC servos use pulse width.