Hey everyone,

I just bought a 2006 GS 300 from a friend. Single owner and fairly well taken care of.

When I went to get an oil change at the local Toyota dealership, I noticed that the driver side vents blew cold air (temp was on max heat). I asked the dealership's service department to check it out.

They called back and said it was the air mix servo motor, and quoted me $1,400 to repair. I wasn't prepared at the moment to pay that, and so I said I'd wait to repair it. After reading some threads on this forum, I ordered an OEM servo mixer and decided to repair it myself.

I managed to get the screws out fairly easily, but the servo motor would wiggle but not come out. I slowly wiggled it and increased the amount of pressured I used to pull it out. And, eventually, it broke.




As you can see, the little gear arm or tab broke off.

I tried to get it with pliers, but it ended up pushing through the black gear and falling somewhere.





My question is: what do I need to do now? Do I just install the new servo motor and ignore that a part of that white gear arm fell somewhere? Or do I need to try to disassemble things and try to find the broken-off piece?

Bonus question: I tried to install the servo motor after this, but it doesn't seem like the gear arm (or tab or whatever it is called) isn't clicking snugly into the gear or whatever that black thing is. Is that okay?

(I wish I just would've paid the $1,400 )

 

UPDATE: I managed to get the new servo motor on after some difficulty. I'm just going to ignore the broken off tab for now and see what happens.

 

Did that fix the hot air issue? Because I would have guessed it was a clogged heater core, and a reverse flush would help.

 

Haha. No. It didn't. I was just about to draft another post about it.

How do I know if it is a clogged heater core versus a bad servo motor?

(Also, do you know if there are 2 driver side air mix servo motors in 3rd Gen GS models? There seemed to be another one above the one I replaced, but I cannot find anything about it. Everything I read on these forums talked about their just being one air mix servo motor; but those might be other models.)

 

These GS's are known to clog the heater core. Especially for cars that havent had there coolant replaced. What you can do is look on youtube for flushing heater core. Basically you remove both hoses of the heater core and with a garden hose attach it to the outlet of the core that way you reverse flush it. Try it with water alone, and then top off the coolant with regular water or distilled. If the heater works then great drain all the coolant and replace with toyota premixed coolant.

Also if you have never replaced your water pump, I would do that. As these engines our water pumps last about 90-100k and theres a high risk of over heating the engine. Just something to consider! The aisin pumps are cheap on rockauto, I would also do thermostat, idler pulley, serpentine belt