W124 Blower motor replacement – part 1

I’ve known that the blower motor needed replacement on my 300TE since purchase.   It didn’t like to work on low settings and would make pretty bad squeaking noises.    The second to last owner had even planned on replacing it, but ran out of time before he sold the car.     I had it on my list to do and ideally planned to do it before the trip to Tasmania in December/January.

I looked into this and found an excellent video from ‘MMWA’ on youtube on how to replace the W124 blower motor.  If you own a W124 and you don’t subscribe to this channel, you should.   Since MMWA does such a good job of explaining the job, I’m not going to repeat things here.     My car is quite similar to his in terms of this job.   Its a series 2 with the manual A/C rather than the full climate control found on US Spec cars.

Based on the video, I ordered the exact blower motor he used.   Some of the motors available from the usual suspects were either brands I hadn’t heard of, or don’t trust.    Since I got busy with work and other things, the trip was coming up and I decided not to do this job.    Since its quite involved I was worried that I would have some issue or break some part and I wouldn’t be ale to reassemble the car in time.

In retrospect, I’m glad I made this decision.

On the way back from Tasmania, the blower finally failed on the last day of the trip.    Since it was the middle of summer, I wasn’t that keen on using the car without A/C, so I set about starting the job.

As is outlined in the video, its quite involved.   It was interesting that the bits on my car that were broken were totally different to on his car.  In particular, he talks about speed nuts around the wiper surround that were totally missing.   In the service history, the motowiper was replaced with a used unit a few years ago.   I guess they were lost then.

After a few hours I had the old W124 blower motor out.   It was a Bosch unit, and it was really hard to move by hand.  No wonder it failed.

The next day I returned assuming that it would be a simple matter of installing the new blower and putting the car back together.   However, the blower I had would not fit.   the squirrel cages were about 1cm offset from the housing.   I tried moving the cages, even lubricating the shaft with WD/40.  They would not move.    I wasn’t that keen on this anyway, as back years ago I bought a motor only blower for my 107 and tried to use the hot water method to transfer the cages from the old motor to the new.   They never really balanced and not long later I finally found a whole blower and replaced it.

My blower motor came in a plain brown box, unlike MMWAs.   At this point I was wondering if perhaps I had been sent a series 3 blower.   The series 3 cars have cabin air filters, and in the EPC, the blower is a little different.   I’ve never owned a series 3 car, so not sure if this was my problem, or I just got a blower that was damaged or faulty.

Since I purchased the blower from a vendor that didn’t ship to Australia, and used a remailer, returning it wasn’t going to be simple either.

In the end, I did what I should have done in the first place.  I looked up if there was still a genuine blower for sale, and there was.  It wasn’t even any more expensive than the aftermarket one.   So now I have a genuine bower on order that should fit correctly.    The car has been off the road since mid January,  since It would be irresponsible to drive with no wiper.