Fiat Panda
The Car:
The Problem:
Fan works on position four only.
Required:
Resistor: OEM Part No. 46723713
5.5mm socket
Bendy extension thingy
Ttwo wrists in the same arm
Very small hands
Bucket full of Patience
Dictionary of swear words
Method:
So the heater fan started going wonky on my partners 2009 Fiat Panda, then only worked on the highest setting, number 4, which sounds something akin to holding a hair dryer to your ear, whilst extremely efficient at clearing the windscreen, it's not easy to talk to passengers, hear the radio or even your own thoughts, but when off in the colder months it's hard to keep the windscreen clear.
I'm prone to tinkering with cars, if only to save the cost and hassle of taking it to a garage, a little bit of electrical fixing is well within my ball park. I did a quick bit of research online and found the part that was required (PART No. 46723713) and a replacement was a reasonable sum. I ordered it from Amazon as it was the cheapest option, it was from another store advertising on Amazon and came quickly. I think it has been on the sideboard in the kitchen for nearly a year as I was dreading fitting it, when time allowed it was either freezing out, or baking out. The part itself came in an original Fiat part box but I'm not convinced it is an actual Fiat part, the box was very beaten up had been opened and it was wrapped in a badly cut second hand piece of bubble wrap.
The actual part is fixed into the car right up in the dashboard near the firewall with very very limited access. If you turn the heater controls to recirculate you can see the blighter up in the fan ducting, it's the green whatsit hiding up there smirking at you.
All normal access to the part required a contorsionist, needing to kneal outside of the car leaning over the sill but also twisting your body over 90 degrees so that you can look and reach up inside the dashboard, so I thought I'd clear the way and remove the drivers seat, four 6mm allen bolts and an electrical clip and I was able to wangle the seat from the car (mind they're heavy!). A quick whizz around with Henry the vacuum cleaner and it was a slightly more habitable space to work in.
You need to lay on your back, and place your head with the brake pedal in your right eye, you should just be able with the aid of a torch to see the nearest bolt with your left eye. Squeezing a hand between the steering column and heater fan box I could touch the first bolt. Removing my hand from this space also ended in me relieving myself of some blood, everything seems really sharp in that gap!
I'd like to know what sort of mental torture the designer/engineer was going through at Fiat when this mounting point was chosen. Had they just split from thier significant other, did they have kids at 'that awkward age', were they denied a raise in salary? Perhaps they need some sort of therapy.
Thankfully Fiat didn't go with a black bolt, they're silver so you can just about make them out in the black void of the world behind the dashboard. Getting light into that area is almost impossible because the space required for a torch is exactly where you need either a hand, tool, or to be able to see what is going on. I nonchalently found my 6mm socket and also grabbed a 5mm one from my toolbox just in case to try on the bolt, a lot of fiddling on a nearby accessible bolt found that no, the 6mm was too big, and the 5mm too small, these bolts are 5.5mm so I had to spend a good 20mins searching for one, completely unaware of ones existence within my array of tools (Mental note, sort out the tools boxes!), luckily I did have one. The next issue is getting some sort of tool onto the end of the socket. I started with a 1/4" ratchet which I had to pass into the space, hook it onto some nearby wiring before I could then weave my hand into the space.
I managed to almost completely remove the screw before the ratchet slipped from my grasp and down behind the fan box, once I had extracted it, I just couldn't for the love of me get it back onto the bolt again, some swearing ensued. I needed another plan. A dig around in some tool boxes in the garage yielded a bendy screwy type device, just the sort of thing you could stick in a drill driver and screw around corners, what a thing! It has just enough ridigity to almost stay in the shape you bend it into. As it was made to accept a screw driver bit in one end I had to find an adapter to fix my socket to the end of, luckily I found a suitable bit, then on the driven end I found it was 6mm socket sized so added the 6mm socket to my ratchet. It all came together and with a tad more swearing I managed to get the socket back on the bolt and remove it fully and almost loose it instantly as it tried to disappear into a void between the heater drain hose and the carpet and sound deadening.
Fitting is the reversal of removal or something in the wise words given by a Haynes manual in such circumstances but first I decided to just plug the resistor into the wiring and give it a whirl, I certainly didn't want to replace it with one that was broken as well. Plugging it in and switching on the ignition and flicking through all four settings the fan worked beautifully, so now I just had to refit it. Although the plug slipped into the resistor very easily I now couldn't unplug it again, they're almost impossible to do with one hand, nothing I did allowed me to unclip it, I'd already drawn blood from the palm of my hand removing the old one so I thought I would just stick it in the hole and bolt it back up... oh if only it was that easy. A mixture of a shortage of cable and a shortage of space meant turning it around in the space and into its home turned into another swearathon! eventually it sucummbed, I just hoped I hadn't broken it in the process.
Getting the bolt home again wasn't without its problems, I couldn't reach the hole with the screw with a finger and thumb to be able to start it into the hole, so I found a small piece of rubber wiring insulation and jammed that and the bolt head into the socket thus making it easier to get the bolt to the hole on the flexy doofer without it falling off. Amazingly I managed to get it straight in and tightened up. I didn't have another bolt for the other side as the previous owner had left it out I thought I'd save myself the agrovation and leave it as well, or could that be the reason that one had failed...
At this point my partner came out to see how progress was going, with a silly grin I turned on the ignition and turned the fan to one to show her my handy work... only it didn't work, my mind started racing and I was somewhere between smashing the car up and crying, but I glanced over at the old one and noticed that a couple of the four connections were a bit rusty. So had I just replaced one that just needed the connections cleaning up? Had I just broken a new one fitting it? I had a quick waggle of the connector and it sprang to life in setting one, then two, then three, then four as she turned the knob blowing a ton of dust into my eyes as I was still led with my head under the dashboard.
Just in case the old one did work I've stuck it in the box the 'new' one came in and put it on the shelf in the cupboard.
So throwing it all back together and walking away and putting the kettle on as fast as possible was the end game now, maybe we should discuss getting that Fiat 500 Abarth that she'd always actually wanted but we couldn't afford at the time of buying the Panda...
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