Max A/C stopped working - recirculator door arm broke

[scotty7676]

Hey all, I think I'm screwed, but I'd like to have an idea of what's going on before I take it in to the shop.

I have an '04 XLS with the plain jane air/heat controls and about 2 weeks ago, everything works (heat, defrost, etc), but the max a/c does nothing. So I finally crawled under the passenger side and started testing vacuum lines and actuaters. Everything checked out ok, so I took out the actuator that controls the recirculator door and noticed the arm that controls the recirculator door was just flopping around like it wasn't hooking up with the door mechanism. I pulled it out and noticed the end is broke off.

I thought maybe I could just buy the arm and slide it in there and be done, but I stuck a screwdriver in the hole and there isn't anything to hook up to. I'm guessing something inside there has busted. Any ideas what to do? I don't see anyway of taking it all apart besides pulling the dash out, but maybe there's a trick? Anyways, I have attached a picture of the broken arm, and hope maybe someone can point me in the right direction (sorry the picture sucks). Also, found two part numbers on this:

4246-A
1L2H-18735-A

Thanks!
Scott

 

[kayaker]

Today I noticed the recirculator arm sitting in the passenger floorboard of our '04 Explorer. It appears a small piece of the plastic part has broken off and I'm wondering what the fix is. While A/C is working, there is no difference in the volume of air from vents when Max A/C setting is selected. Does anyone know how to fix this?

 

[maruefer]

found the same issue on our 2004 ford Explorer, any help on the fix for this broken part?

 

[scotty7676]

You can pull out the blower and reach up in the hole to position the door and glue the arm back in with a plasti-weld or something similar as a temp fix. But ultimately, you have to replace the whole assembly, as the reason the arm broke in the first place was because the plastic got brittle, it just breaks somewhere else eventually. So the whole dash has to come out to replace the recirculator door, housing, etc assembly.

But, it get's better!! Eventually the same thing happens to the arm that controls the air flow to the vents/defroster. So if you have the dash out, you may want to consider replacing those parts too.