The electrical testing went extremely well. Everything functioned and the motor fired right up and no codes were thrown. I’m waiting for my son Brian to come up and give me a hand with thinning out that wiring harness, so in the meantime I have been fooling around with some little things. The Fargo came with this Mopar heater box. I’m not sure if it’s original, but the heater box is super cool so I decided to see if it could be worth saving.
There’s really not a lot to these old heat/vent systems:
During disassembly I found a half dozen dark little discs inside the box, and after setting them in a mix of vinegar and salt I was rewarded with this:
They turned out to be in wonderful condition and were all from 1933 to 1946. A quick internet check revealed that the 6 coins are now worth $1.20, and that’s exactly $1.20 more than I have made selling leftover S10 parts! I may try to incorporate them into something inside the cab.
After some testing it appears that the core is leak free, but that motor was 100% seized up solid. I ran into a bit of luck where the motor was concerned. I had been putting off cleaning up my parts storage area, which is mostly leftover parts from our ‘56 Chevy wagon build. I finally got to it, and lo and behold what do I find? A trifive blower motor in excellent condition. It had clearly been indoors for a long time (no rust at all). I hooked it up to a battery and it sprang to life. Because of how long it had sat, I did an old trick for blower motors. By drilling a tiny hole in the bottom, you can get oil into the bottom bushing:
Sure enough, a bit of oil and the motor sped up and ran like a top. Fixing the rest of the heater box was straight forward. The original fan blade was affixed to the motor shaft collar by some sort of crimped on flange that had to be ground off during disassembly so I ordered a flange collar off of Amazon. Three weeks and 8 dollars later the collar arrived. I purposely ordered a collar with a bore size under 5/16 inch as I’d rather drill it out to proper size, than discover the bore was a bit too big for the 5/16 blower shaft and end up with a wobbly mess. Here’s the old motor with the chewed up press-on fitting (upper left), the “new” motor and the fan blade with the flange collar.
The smooth sailing came to an end during reassembly when I realized the new motor was just a bit longer than the old one, and wouldn’t quite fit inside the box. To further slow me down I discovered that access to the fan blade is only from one side during reassembly so I couldn’t just use nuts and bolts to fasten it to the flange collar. The longer motor required some slicing and welding of the top of the box:
And the lack of access to the underside of the fan was resolved by making a little flange to screw the fan bolts into without the need for underside access. I did this instead of just tapping the flange collar, as it was not very thick and I wasn’t sure how good the metal was:
Here’s the final product:
I did some testing and discovered that it’s fairly quiet, however those old motors don’t seem to push air like the new ones. I may just wire it up as a 1 speed fan and only use full speed on the fairly rare occasions that I need a heater or defroster.
More to follow!