2021 Tundra - Blend Door/heating update. You gotta see this.

Alright gentlemen, I feel obligated to share this with you. This was the craziest experience I've had with a vehicle.

I posted a while back about a suspecting bled door issue that i was having. Symptoms were no heat in the front, only ambient air. Heat worked in backseat vents, and AC only worked in the front seat vents.

From a little research I found some people having issues with their "servo motor assembly" although the noises i was hearing from the dash were different, and none of these people had this issue on a 2014 or newer that i found. I also plugged into techstream and there were 0 codes that came up but it made this terrible noise when testing "air targ servo pulse". So i decided to go to my local toyota dealer and pick up the following part below.




I dove in that evening and quickly realized that i had bigger problems.
I was hearing the noise coming from the servo, but as soon as i got it off, i realized i was in big trouble


This gear fell off of my main air box as soon as i got the servo off. You can see I drilled a hole in it with hopes of being able to fasten the gear back on, but this was a desperate attempt that would never have worked. There was obviously something that caused this to break.

I thought I was going to get away just changing the servo in blue, but this gear broke off my main box in red. this gear was attached to what seems to be the main temperature door, so things started to make sense.

I called toyota and they wanted almost 3k for labor alone, and the had no availability. They also told me that this part was on national backorder and would have to be ordered from japan, so that would be a months long wait just for the part.

I called just about every toyota dealer in the US and there ended up being one about an hour from me. i picked it up for just under 1k.

I called up some of the smartest guys i know and we got to work.

It's not fun to see a truck you just bought looking like this.



She actually came back together flawlessly. Only broke a few plastic clips that were insignificant.

This was the culprit. it was stuck to the door and prevented it from closing all the way, presumably stressing that gear until it snapped. All that for a .22 shell case. The sad part is that it wasn't even mine. Thankfully i had good friends to help me out, i paid them what they asked for their time and we traded off back and fourth until it was done. We finished in about 12 hours or so total over 2 days time.

This was a crazy and scary experience being that i couldn't find anyone with a similar experience on such a new year model. If anyone has an issue like this and has questions id be happy to answer them.

The tundy lives another day, and the heat can fry an egg now.