Noise in blower in 2000 LeSabre, remove dashboard.

I have something in my blower motor that creates a loud rumble but I can't seem to get to the motor. I need to get the dash off. Any suggestions?

I have the same problem with my 2000 and have already gone the route of taking the entire dash apart, there is nothing to see in there. The blower motor is under the hood on this car it turns out. If you pop the hood and look up under where the windshield wipers are on the passenger side of the firewall there is a little compartment with a pop out panel there. I think all of these cars have the cabin air filter, if you just open that little panel you'll find a white air filter in there, pull it out. Under that filter you can see the blower motor. I have tried to pinpoint the source of this very annoying sound but can not. My next step is to try the dealer, but I don't hold out much hope up there. If anyone else has had this problem with the A/C fan grinding noise, please post any repair attempts or solutions you have found, it is enough to drive a sane man crazy??? The sound of my A/C fan is now louder than the sound of my engine when I pull up to a stoplight, another wonderful example of GM engineering, when did this company start producing such junk?

Bearing is probably going out in the blower motor. That of something has fallen into the blades of the blower motor.

I'm begining to get the feeling the 2000 LeSabre has some issues. What with the tail lights filling with water and all. I guess that is too be expected, 2000 was another transition year for the LeSabre body style.

Course 1995 was the most screwed up transistion year I can think of, the whole engine management system changed to comply with OBD-II. Yet... I have never had a real problem out of my 1995... at least not a real problem that wasn't the result of me breaking something. LOL

Well I got to the blower motor through the firewall and it seems to be running nice and smooth, see the thing is this sound only pops up when the engine is idling and producing some vibration. For example if you are stopped at a light the blower motor will start with the noise, then as soon as you hit the gas to take off the sound goes away. It almost seems like something that has to do with the position of a mixer or something in the duct work that is only in a certain position when you have the A/C system turned on, but I havn't tried cutting power to the blower motor yet to see if that makes the noise go away. I am thinking that perhaps if I can make the system operate as if the blower is running then everything in the duct work should be positioned the way it is normally. When you press the "off" button this changes all kinds of things in the dash and the strange noise goes away also, but that doesn't necessarily mean the sound is going away because the blower fan quits. In fact when you press the "off" button the sound dies immediately, if it were the blower bearings I would expect it to taper off as the motor comes to a slow hault. I need to take a look in the shop manual and figure out a good easy way to cut power to just the blower motor without interrupting the rest of the A/C system, not sure what else is on the fuse.

In the engine compartment, under the maxi fuse / relay center, on the firewall, you'll see the back side of the blower motor. There should be an electrical wiring harness coming out of it with a plug. Just unplug the blower fan.

Ok, first of all I want to appologize for some mis-information before. According to my shop manual for the 2000, the new location of the blower motor and fan is indeed inside the passenger compartment. Even though you can see the fan and motor from under the hood when you pull the filter, in order to remove the blower fan and motor you have to take apart the lower dash on the passenger side. I never remembered seeing it in there, but I followed the manual and of course there it is. Also, the power connector for the blower motor can only be accessed from inside the car, its actually fairly easy to simply disconnect it. When I finally got to the point where I could put my hand on the blower motor assembly and run the stupid thing, I can actually feel it knocking in sync with the noise it is making. Seems pretty clear that this is a problem within the blower housing. But here is the problem, Following exactly the procedure outlined in the shop manual, I can see NO way that this motor can be removed. The floor pan is literally in the way, Ive got the carpet stripped back, only a rubber padding is left, but I can't see that it is thick enough to give me the clearance I need. There is no way to remove the rubber padding without cutting it, it is bolted up with the magnesium dash frame. The fan is about nine inches tall with the motor and it is about 5 inches off the floor pan, I hope one of the GM techs reads this because I am completely stuck right now, even if I get the damn thing out of here with brute force, how will I get the new one installed?? The design has completely changed since the pre-2000 model year and it must be the stupidest thing I have ever seen. I spent 42 bucks by the way on special adapters and flex shafts just to remove the screws.

So I take it the fan is mounted in a vertical fashion? Upward into the bottom of the "blower box" / air distribution ducts / whatever? Why don't you just unbolt the entire assembly that the fan is attached too. Then you could remove it, or at least position sideways to get the needed clearance.

This is a permanent fixture as far as I can tell, the housing is never meant to be removed without removing the entire dash assembly. GM is assembling their dash boards outside of the car now, this is why the stuff is so hard to take apart once it is installed. When you get inside everything that is servicable is modular, the rest is molded plastic attached with rivets in some cases to a frame that is aparently made entirely out of magnesium. most of the stuff comes apart the way it should, but I am finding that it looks as though the dash to floor clearance on my car is less than it should be, or at least really really tight. Tomorrow I am going to take one more shot at it in broad daylight, if I can't work it past the padding then I will have to surgically cut the thick rubber pad to try and gain some extra room. I can't see that a mechanic would be approaching this any differently, there is no tool, nothing that could help me in this situation, I think the dealer would probably just cut the pad out of the way. Also, you are right, the motor and fan assembly install up from the bottom, in other words when you take 6 or so very well hidden 7/32 bolts out, the whole thing should just drop right out. I was going to drag it up to the dealer and let them worry about it. See if it is the fan that is bad, then this is covered under my warrenty, but if something else is rattling, well then that isn't covered and I get the bill for all this labor. Once I get the fan removed, I then need to play some dirty tricks to try and play "mechanic" to get my GM protection plan to pick up the bill. The fan is like 200 bucks. I just hope I don't have a problem with the housing itself.

Alright... you said the motor and fan is like 9 inches long. I'm invisioning a motor with a fan blade attached to the end. Or something along those lines... doesn't really matter as I'm theorizing right now. (As I have no idea what it looks like.)

You have 5 inches of clearance from the fan to the floor. Can you take the assembly loose and let it drop onto the floor board?

By doing that, you should have 5 inches of what's inside exposed. I would guess that the fan can be seperated from the motor by removing a retaining clip (probably a C-ring). If you have 5 inches of it exposed, you may be able to seperate the blower motor assembly into two pieces. Either blower motor and fan, or take part of the motor off... hell, I don't know. LOL

If you can split the blower motor assembly into two halves, half of 9 is 4.5 inches. With 5 inches of clearance, you'd be able to get it out.

Cutting up the rubber floor mat, as it is permanently installed, is likely just a bad idea. 1) It might affect your warrenty. 2) Cutting things always leads to other problems. 3) It probably won't get you any more then half an inch of clearance. 4) My bet is that it is GLUED to the steel underbody. In which case, cutting it won't accomplish anything.

Also... different idea. Instead of cutting the rubber mat, you may be able to take out all the bolts that are pinning it under the dash frame and wrestle it out from under it. It's a long shot, but it might happen with some cussing, provided it isn't glued down.

Now also... I was reading a couple of the post above again. You said it only occurs when the engine is idling and stationary right? (Doesn't matter if it's in gear or not.) Does it also only occur when the A/c is turned on? A/c on Max of normal A/c? Or also when the vent and heater is turned on?

When you use Max A/c the system turns on the Recirculator blower, closes the vent to the outside, and sucks the air in from the passenger compartment. If it only occurs on Max A/c or when the Recirculate button is pressed, this may point closer to the problem. Such as the fan slapping against the side of the door that closes off air from the outside because it didn't close all the way or something.

When you start driving, air pressure from the outside might close it all the way. (?) Or with increased RPMs, you may produce additional needed vacuum to pull the door closed all the way that you lack when at idle. The latter could be tested by putting the car in park, hand on the blower motor, and other hand pressing on the gas pedal. If such is the case, it's likely the check valve that keeps vacuum leaks in the cruise control and environmental from leaking the vacuum to the rest of the engine systems that run on vacuum.

Also, when you say "shop manual" are you refering to a Chilton/Haynes manual or to the 2000 Buick LeSabre Factory Service manual? If you have the latter, I would sit in the car with the manual and go through the steps a couple dozen times and try to figure out what I missed.

The factory manuals are usually spot on, but they are worded so funky that's it's easy to skip over a step because you think you already did it. (If it helpfull to read the section heading in addition to ever step listed below it. I.E. Install 1) Gasket. Install 2) Cover. Install 3) 4 forward bolts. Etc.

I was able to remove the fan assembly as one piece by cutting away all of the padding on the floor. That was the only way it was possible, the fan wasn't as big as I thought it was, but it was still too large to come out with all of the carpet and sound insulation padding in the way. Well the carpet pulled out of the way, but there was about an inch of padding that was permanently fixed and had to be cut. I'm pretty sure the fan bearings are shot, now I need to get a new one and put everything back together.

Yeah, I have the GM shop manuals, I don't even bother with chilton/hanes stuff, I find them useless. The 2000 books are not as well written or as detailed as the ones for my 1992. Most of the time with the new manuals they are completely inadequate in describing the repair procedure. In this case I can see exactly what happened to make it so tight. I might have been able to really wrestle the fan out without cutting the pad away but I didn't want to risk breaking the plastic fan itself or the housing. The manual suggested as one step, completely removing the DIM module, I followed procedure although I couldn't see how it would help, the DIM wasn't in the way. Conclusion... there was no reason to remove the DIM and disconnect all the wiring harnesses, just a complete waste of time. It is almost as if the manual was written for a slightly different vehicle, lol, GM even gets lazy in these new books and uses diagrams from the bonneville, if you don't know both cars then it can be a little disorienting. There were lots of things that could have caused this noise in the fan other than the fan itself, I ruled out all things related to the engine running because I was able to re-produce the noise in accessory mode without the engine running. None of the mode settings changed the nature or behavior of the noise, and it mainly occured at slower fan speeds or during transition from one speed to another. I got to the point where I couldn't go any further in my diagnostic path without actually ruling out the fan motor or fan assembly itself. The armature of the motor seems really loose and the bearings don't spin freely, in fact it squeaks as you turn the motor. Once I feel that I have better than a 50/50 chance of finding the source of the problem in a complex situation like this, I can justify the shot at replacing an expensive part. If the issue is anything more than a bad blower motor, then it isn't worth taking apart what would have to be taken apart in order to work on the rest of the guts of the A/C system.