1998 montana recirc door motor noisy

[rkvons]

Last year when it started getting colder, this noise started coming from the dash on the right side. I thought it was the blower motor because I seemed to not be able to hear it when I turned up the speed. Anyway, fast-forward to last week, the wife tells me that she had no air coming out on any fan speed. Alright!, I exclaimed! Now I can fix it. Anyway, I go in and remove the retainers on the right side that hold the underneath cover on and pull that away. I then remove the bolts to the blower motor and drop it down, and then I turn on the fan and watch to see what happens. It worked great. All speeds. But as I'm watching it, I hear the funny noise coming from under the dash in the upper right hand corner somewhere. I'll make a long story short here. If you pop the column cover off on the right side near the dash and then pop up the gray dash cover up near the windshield, you can see the recirc door mechanism and the little motor module that controls it. This was making noise. I also noticed that it did not move the recirc door. So I took it out (wasn't easy, removing the glove box helps), disconnected the electrical connector and removed it to the garage. I opened it up. It has a little motor, a bunch of gears and a printed circuit board in it. GM wants over $200 for it. The main gear that turns the recirc door had two cracks in it and it was getting stuck on the gear that drives it. So I go to a junk yard and look around and I find this 2002 Grand AM GT. The dash on the right is all torn out, so I look up in there and there is one of these things in there. I take it out, open it up and see that the big gear is not cracked. I asked the old lady back at the office how much. She said $15. I get home and pop it in and nothing. I pull it out and compare the electrical connectors and they are different. So I open them both up and exchange the broken gear for the good one and put the original one back in. I button it all up and bingo, fixed. I'm a happy camper. By the way, the recirc door is held to "recirc" by gravity and the motor turns it uphill to "outside air". If the gear is stripped or cracked, chances are you are on perpetual "recirc" and cannot get out.