I have an issue that all started back a few months ago doing some suspension work while listening to the stereo and drained the battery. When I left my buddy's place I noticed I only had air coming out of the front vents on defrost setting, then found that it was stuck there on any setting. I did some research and found some info on resetting the blend door actuator. Could not find the IOD fuse on my model, or if I did it didn't affect anything, but wound up disconnecting the battery for half an hour or so and reconnected. That seemed to do the trick if I remember right for a few days anyhow. Everything seemed to reset and go back to normal. Then it got stuck again a week or two later in some other position.

I did some more research and removed dash trim and kick panels etc. to inspect what was going on with the actuator and see if it was faulty. I removed the actuator with power harness connected and started up, could see that the drive on the motor was turning on each setting and could see it do it's thing when doing a reset. I also was able to move the armature up and down manually with the air on and air would move from vent to vent without any issues. STILL not sure how it got messed up in the first place. The only thing I noticed was when I went to screw the thing back on the screw holes wouldn't line up.

After carefully taking the actuator apart and lifting the gear end of the tiny electric motor out of the assembly enough to allow me to spin the drive stud on the back side to get it lined up with the plastic arm, and get the screw holes to line up, snapping the cover back on, I got the thing reinstalled with the setting on the deck to what i had moved the arms to manually, then did a reset. Everything worked great for a month or so. Then it got stuck again so I just bought a replacement (NEW) blend door actuator and installed that thinking the actuator motor could be the issue. That one worked for more than a month and then got stuck a few days ago AGAIN.

The thing I noticed when it was stuck this time is that I could hear the actuator motor turning and turning like it was doing a reset every time I would start up the car and then it would eventually give up or stop doing whatever it was doing. I tried going thru the same routine as before and tried a reset but noticed after I removed the actuator and left the harness plugged in and watched it, it didn't act right. still spinning and spinning on start up and won't turn to the proper position when switching from defrost to vents etc. I thought, ok this one got messed up internally because it was jammed this way for over a week or two. So I got the old one that I'm fairly certain was working fine and plugged it in and it does the same thing, turns and turns and won't go to the proper setting. So either I have two bad actuators and/or something else going on that may be causing them to go bad from jamming up or for what ever reason isn't reseting to get rid of this behavior. I am going to a recking yard to get a few actuators and sets of armature and see how they fit together when i'm taking them off, compare what I found to my car etc. If I get the same behavior from multiple actuators after a longer reset time etc. I will know there is something else going on.

Is there anywhere I can find a diagram or picture of the blend door actuator armature and how it it supposed to go together before I replace that too? Seems like a nightmare to take apart and put together. Any reason this keeps happening? Any idea how it happened to begin with? Any idea which/ where the IOD fuse is? Picture of where it is in the fuse panel? Any help appreciated.