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I was replacing a dead blower motor on my 2000 9-5 and discovered that my recirculation flap motor is broken. This motor is just a plain DC motor with a gear box and a small plastic arm on the output. The arm is just driven between two hard stops. Due to some genius engineer effort the plastic arm has a few light-weighting cutouts in it - which probably saved saab about 0.1 cent per car in raw materials and reduced the weight by a few milligrams. The problem is as the car gets older the plastic gets weaker and the arm breaks. It their wisdom Valeo put a second set of hard stops inside the gear box but again miscalculated the strengths of aging plastic. Those fail in short order sending bits of broken plastic into the gear box - and then the gears break. The replacement motor is $200 and the new arm is $30.
Because it is so expensive I wanted to buy a used one and headed to a local junk yard. I have removed 5 motors from pre-2002 9-5s and EVERY SINGLE ONE had a broken arm and internal hard stops. Only with great effort I have managed to assemble a set of intact gears between 5 broken motors and make a single working motor - and I still had to buy a new $30 arm from eEuro.
By the way, because a nature of the motor the ACC has no way to determine if it is broken - so there would be no codes associated with a broken recirculation motor. Just reduced AC performance in the summer and maybe some grinding noise the switching the recirculation on or off.
So given my experience I would say that if you drive a pre-2002 car your recirculation motor is most likely broken. Not sure about later 9-5s - another genius saved a couple more cents by removing the philips head indentation from the screws - so the motor removal now requires a special tool that I do not have so I have no experience with later cars.
2000 Saab 9⁵ 2.3t SportCombi (303k)
2008 Saab 9³ 2.0T SportCombi (130k)
posted by 108.20.27...
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