My Vant/Heater blower has quit on me. Now the temp controls have not worked properly since I have owned the stang and I have never tried the heater since I rarely drive it during the cold months. I had managed to get the vent to blow through the defroster by manually adjusting all the wires under the dash that redirect the air through the ducting. I am thinking about starting to work on restoring the vent/heater system next so that I have some additional air when driving, and getting the heat working so I can extend my driving season.

What is the best way to trouble shoot the blower motor? I already checked the fuse and it is good. HOw do I isolate if the motor is the problem or if the switch on the control is the problem? Does anyone may a kit to restore the heater and vents that includes all the vacuum lines and acuators? By the way this is in a 72 Grande, it originally had A/C but all the under the hood A/C stuff was removed by a PO.

Thanks

 

If the blower motor is like my 65, you could just open the hood, cut the wires going to it, and put the positive on the battery and ground the negative. Most likely your switch is shot along with probably broken cable ends. Those cable ends tend to rust off. The cables themselves may be rusted internally, so you will need to take out the switch and cables and replace that as a unit.

 

THanks Soaring.

Any other thoughts or ideas?

 

Unfortunately for the 1972 you can't access the blower motor directly. It lives inside the plastic heater box under the dash, and to get to the motor you have to remove the whole box. That is a job I remember as being unpleasant. Actually, let me correct myself... the setup might be different for a factory AC car. There are completely different sections in the shop manual for heater core / blower motor replacement for AC vs. non-AC cars for the 72. All I know for sure right now is that for the non-AC cars you need to take out the box to get to the motor.

One thing you could try first is to get the blower motor switch out of there. I don't recall the whole procedure, but it is covered in the shop manual. Get the switch out and flood all of the contacts with electronic contact cleaner. I flooded the switch itself (lots of contacts in there) as well as the plug contacts at the end. It is then possible to just plug the switch back in without reassembling everything, and you can see if that gets the motor working again. In my case cleaning the switch did get the motor back online, but it ran weak. I pulled the box out and tested the motor exactly as Soaring suggested. It worked great right off the battery but was weak while still installed. After all that work I just bought a new motor and after reinstall it works as new. I didn't want to risk getting it working and then having to repeat the job a year later.

I will comment that it was such a pain to get the box out of there, that I decided to take out the whole dashboard at that time and clean up some surface rust on the firewall. Dashboard removal made reinstalling the heater box a whole lot easier. Anyways, try cleaning the switch first and with some luck maybe you can avoid this hassle.

 

Just as an afterthought... if you do end up needing to take out the box, then the blower motor and heater core are parts you can get cheap at your local parts store. You can remove the drum / fan from the old motor, it's just a plastic press-fit piece. I bought just a motor for 25 bucks and a heater core for like 18, that was 3 or so years ago. I think most of the vendors sell you the motor with a new plastic drum at quite a bit higher price.