mranderson214
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- August 3, 2010
- Messages
- 162
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- City, State
- Brooklyn, NY
- Year, Model & Trim Level
- 2002 XLT
This is the one I had just watched that had me going "wtf?"
Supposedly it's for 2002-2008 explorers and it shows some paddle thing snacking a button behind the center console stack. Everything about the problem and noise are right but what the heck is the part he claims is the problem?
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H7xiRa2ZcCE
So that part that's hitting the button in the video is actually the blend door itself. That's not actually a button btw, but I know what you meant haha. I had the same problem/symptoms.
Basically the problem is your blend door motor/actuator. As mentioned in my last post, it's an electric motor that drives a shaft. The shaft of that actuator goes into a hole, which turns more gears and help moves the blend door. Now, the blend door, is the black plastic flap in the video. Actually, thats part of the blend door. 9/10 times, the blend door itself is fine but the motor (actuator) goes bad.
So what happens is that, the blend door motor keeps trying to spin the shaft but it doesn't spin because of broken gears inside the motor assembly. So the flap motor will keep trying to spin the shaft but eventually it reaches a point/position where the shaft will no longer spin. When this happens, the blend door will just do the clicking thing shown in the video.
When this happened to me, it was the dead of winter and I needed a quick fix for heat, so i actually did the same temporary fix. Basically you stick your hand behind the glove box and manually push the blend door (flap) into position. I believe it was down for hot air and up for cold air (or possibly vice versa, I forget). Once you do that you'll have heat.
Warning though, when manually pushing the blend door by hand, you shouldn't use the temperature dial as it'll try to spin the shaft again and you'll have to do the manual thing all over again. Also, I feel like over time, the manual movement might damage the actual blend door itself. I live in the Northeast (Buffalo, NY and NYC), so last winter was brutal, but not as bad as this one. So I flipped it once and left it in the heat position until April or May. Eventually I changed it in the summer by myself.
It's not that bad of a fix, especially with this detailed walk-through which includes pictures. I would recommend using the Motorcraft blend door actuator. I tried to cut corners by getting a Dorman part but it didn't work, so I got the Motorcraft one and it worked fine. It took me about an hour, but if I had to do it again, it'd probably take 30 minutes or so. Look at the pictures from the OP and what I'm saying about the shafts etc should all make sense.
Hope this helps..