No Heat; 1996 XLT

[Davehi]

Hi; This is my first post to the explorerforum site, so please forgive me if I am beating a dead horse, or starting in the wrong location, thread-wise. My '96 Explorer XLT, with 205,000mi. on the clock went from blowing lot's of heat into the cabin to blowing zero heat, overnight. I checked the fuses for the heater, heat actuator, etc, all good. When I twist the heat control cold to hot with the ignition On, I hear the gears move and stop (no clunking or other broken gear noise). Both heater core hoses are hot at the firewall and the vacuum controlled valve in-line with the incoming hose moves back and forth (I already tried zip tying it open with the engine running but no joy heat-wise). I am pretty much stumped and because I am CheapSkate at heart, I would much rather find a way to temporarily "wire" the Blend Door in the Hot ("Open?") position than spend a bunch of money on a new blower door kit. Anybody have a way to manually set the blower door to "Heat," at least for the winter? It's currently 38F here in SEA and raining. I am motivated for a quick and dirty fix. Thanks!

 

[Turdle]

Welcome to the forum.

I think this is what you are looking for.

http://www.explorerforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=183742

 

[Davehi]

Heat's Back!

Thanks Turdle for the pointer. I followed your link to the "Quick Fix" thread and was able to discover a lot of interesting data. Mainly that you need to either cut a really big hole to stick your hand far enough into the HVAC Plenum to reach the Blend Door, or you need really small hands. Like Elf sized hands. Which I aint got. Fortunately for me I was able to trade losing a bit of skin off my knuckles for fixing the No Heat problem with only a minor investment in a Dremel Tool and a fair bit of Gorilla Tape. Now that I've got heat again I am ready to ignore the real problem of a faulty Blend Door Actuator until the end of Ski Season. So Thank You, Explorerforum, you helped me find a perfectly temporary solution, which is really all I was after in the first place!