So today I pulled the damper motors from the HVAC system of an '09 car The major portion of this nonsense is getting the skid control ECU which is half as big as a long playing record It's unbelievable this thing must be looking for skids anytime the car is on it is huge I don't know four or five plugs once you're able to swing that out of the way the Phillips screws come right out of the damper motors which are right on top of each other I was under the impression one was forward towards the rear of the car and one was backwards towards the front of the car on the box arrangement You can't get to any of them You can't even tell if anything moves while they're sitting in their places once the motors come down you can move the devices or the levers with nary a finger. So I know my issue with this car is not anything binding everything is rotating freely and smoothly upon inspection of one of the motors. There will definitely be no 10 whiskers here this is all circuit board and copper runners there is no spiral wound cable or anything like that going on here so whatever is causing the hunting must be a trace on the circuit board that these copper feet are running against but they all look like they're touching and doing well so it just must be a glitch or the computer that controls the moving and the business I don't know what that would be the body control module?. Is just thinking it's getting a signal and it's sending one back I have no idea. So I have two good motors out of an '09 vehicle that I'm going to put in my '08 when I get around to it it's going to be quite a pain in the car that you're trying to keep and use I'll probably trim and remove that upper mount for the skid control ECU and just have the two on the bottom and the spacer on top a piece of foam or something so it doesn't move around when you're breaking and stuff or anything like that. So in less the motors are bad or something I don't see any reason for the hunting in the motor portion of it. I have pictures of the motors apart and where the location is and how they come out but they never post well so I don't usually bother
Generally, yes. I've seen contacts that looked just fine and conducted electricity not at all. The servo in my gen 1 smoothed right out as soon as I scrubbed up those traces and contact feet with contact cleaner on a cotton swab. The A/C amplifier. It's near the floor under the heater, I believe. (That's where it is in gen 3 for sure.) But I wouldn't overcomplicate things. The signal from the servo is the common easy answer.
That's generation 1 in the picture above mine kind of looks like that except has like five lines on it It's four or five I have to count them and they're nowhere near that clean the grease has gotten darker I guess and all of that The one that I took apart I wasn't careful about indexing it and noting how it went back together or came apart so that was just for testing and taking a look The two out of the '09 car I'll mark and all that take out and clean some new clear dielectric grease or whatever and see what happens. Luckily in the car that I'm trying to fix the face position creates no hunting and any problems and of course coming into air conditioning season that's all that will be getting used.. so it'll be a while till I get these things changed I imagine.
While the dogma is that the problem is always the contacts on these actuators, that wasn't the case on our 1998 Accord, where motor failures were observed. (All 3 actuators were out at the same time. I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out what was wrong with the climate control module, when nothing was!) I suspect the little carbon brushes inside wear out eventually, and while the dogma was probably pretty good for 10 or 12 year old actuators, it doesn't hold up as well for a 27 year old unit. An 18 year old Prius would be somewhere in between. Oh, I forgot to mention, the actuators on the Accord looked almost exactly like the ones on the Prus. Inside those three the case, motor, and gear sizes were all the same, while the wiring, the pattern on the big gear, the contacts to the big gear, and the external actuator arms were different. I guess all the Denso actuators from that era used more or less the same design. I hate those stupid little fragile plastic retaining loops. What was wrong with screws???? The Chinese actuators on Amazon or Ebay are pretty inexpensive, if it comes to that. I put one in the Accord and so far it has been working fine. Ten whiskers? Is that a pun on "tin whiskers"?
Tin yep I spiral cable to mfg the whiskers. Clean is a whistle inside of those things except the ends of the copper a little bars that ride on the disc and some cleared grease that's turning light brown I guess from age and that was it All the copper on the bottom of the little legs or feet were shiny and clean and look like they're making contact so I'm not sure how the thing is hunting. All the controls once I pulled those damper motors off of the white control rods they all flop to their resting positions they're weighted so they all go up or down or whatever they do and then I can move them just by barely touching them with a finger so there's nothing binding which another person was having trouble with something binding these not so much everything moves just barely touching any of the levers and they move easily what I have going on is the thing hunts I put it to blow off the face and it's making a clicking noise like it won't stop there It's hunting for the next position I'm going to ask for but I'm not requesting anything The vent actuator doesn't actually move it bounces like it's hitting the end of travel and it thinks it's getting ready to go somewhere else but the air never moves it just makes this little click I have to have the radio off and the fan on low to even hear it or when I'm sitting in a parking lot and I haven't turned the car off yet I can hear the click click click click and that's that If I put it all the way over to the far right position for the vents and then move back to the far left face I can hear everything move over and then move back and it'll stop clicking and it may be a day or two before it starts clicking again because I rarely move it from the face position where air conditioning here mostly Heat very minimal
When I rebuild those I remove all the old grease first with paper towels and then with sprays of CRC electronic cleaner and some light wiping with a paper towel on the gear surface because the grease seems to stick to that resistor material. That is both the bottom of the big gear and the row of little metal levers which contact it. Then a thin layer of the dielectric grease is applied using a freshly gloved finger (so as not to introduce any contaminants) to the bottom of the big gear only. At that point I checked that the expected resistances or pin to pin connections are present for every rotation of the big gear, then put it back together. I didn't touch any of the grease on the spindles as the gears were all still turning easily. On the Accord the full range of the big gear for the temperature control, if driven by voltages applied directly to the motor, were larger than the range used when the controller was in charge. It did not work properly for the resistive material coated big gear if it was plugged into the car with the gear at either end of its range. I think this was a situation of "I'm expecting 10 Ohms to 200 Ohms and don't know what to do with 5 Ohms or 300 Ohms". On that car I used a battery to position (past) the cold end, then backed it off about 30 degrees and plugged it in. Then it saw resistances which were in range and it worked fine from that point on. I also observed something similar on the mode actuator for that car, where initially it would only go from state A to B, but not back. After it was completely cleaned out, and prepositioned so that the big gear was right in the middle of A, it would then go A to B to C to D and back. (Using letters because I don't recall off hand the order of the vents.) That one just had a complex gold trace on the bottom of the big gear, no resistive elements. But I had to get every last bit of old grease off and apply new before it worked properly. Be sure to get all the grease out from between the levers.
