Good afternoon

 

I have a weird issue with the above: briefly no hot or cold air is now coming out of either the vent at the end of the dash or the small demister vent in the cover over the fuse panel - whereas the selected hot or cold air still comes out of the 2x centre vents and the passenger's end vents (as it also does from the footwell vents above the pedals, and the screen demister vents on the top of the dash)!

 

Having had a look at this webpage on workshop-manuals.com I can't figure out why that should be as there seem to be no movable flaps between Part 25 "Intermediate pience for dash panel vents" (which supplies air to the dash end-vents) and Part 3 "Outer dash panel vent" &  Part 26 "Vent duct" (OK, that page shows the LH drive config, but I assume that the RH drive config is virtually a mirror-image).

 

I also can't see any sign of the "tubes" which connect Part 25 to Part 3 - so are these actually moulded into the Part 1 "Dash Panel"?

 

So, please can anyone suggest what might have occured to cause the problem?

 

NB: The dash has not been removed (at least in the 5+ years I've had the car) and the only thing that has been done, and which could possibly have affected "something", is that the driver's side air vent was replaced late last year, and immediately worked fine with air coming out of it - so the "problem" occured well after that happpened!

I figured out the problem about a month ago after I looked at the old vent which I replaced a few months ago (but, thank goodness, did not "bin"!), but only finally round to fixing it this morning!

 

The problem is that the thumb wheel on the side of the vent not only opens the vent slats in the front face, but also operates an internal flap right at the rear end of the vent assembly. It does this by means of a small crank which fits between the rear side of the thumb wheel mechanism and a cranked arm on the end of the internal flap shaft - but that small crank had broken off and disappeared, hence the internal flap could not be turned, and had got stuck in the closed position.

 

Having first removed the vent assembly by the same means as before (4x table knives, and a couple of plastic trim tools - see my earlier thread if you want the details!) , I then carefully

- "popped" out the remains of the ball head end of the crank that was still in the thumb wheel mechanism

- removed the crank from the old vent - to avoid stressing the crank, I actually cut away part of the sockets with side cutters, and then the crank just fell out.

- fitted the retrieved crank to the replacement vent

- sprayed all the moving parts with silicone spray lubricant to minimise the stiction, and thus the chance of the replacement crank also breaking.

 

I then refitted the repaired vent assembly to the dash, and, lo, I have controllable airflow through that vent again