Alternate no heat/blend door fix.

[betteron2wheels]

First off, I'm a new member and think the site is awesome. It's saved me a lot of time and maybe even trading in my '97 B4000 for a new ride. My truck had full heat or full cold, typical blend door issue. Alldata pointed toward bad blend door actuator but when I pulled the actuator last week before paying the $125 for a new one I found that it rotated when I moved the temp control; hmm, no $125 problem but when I put actuator back in I only had cold air!. After looking at the fixes here, I decided it had to be the door itself. I think I will cut into the bottom and replace the door. Being not quite ready for that and tired of freezing my Ba@% off for the past week I realized I should be able to rotate the door from the top to change it to the heat position. With the limited hand room I couldn't do it with tweezers but thought of another way:

I found a hex key socket (allen wrench) that is the same size as the actuator key but a little longer.
Put it through the hole in the top of the heater duct into what’s left of the blend door keyway.
Rotate blend door to desired position.
The door seems to flop from full open to closed so I wasn’t able to get any less than full heat—better than no heat!

I think mine had a partial break so there was some keyway left to get the hex key in to. The hex key I used is a Snapon 7mm
Next week I'll tackle the lack of overdrive issue!

These show the blend door actuator on my kitchen table with the hex key I inserted into the heater duct.

 

[BrooklynBay]

Welcome to this forum, and thank you for making your first post helpful to everyone!