Day Four - The Widget

It was a beautiful day, a perfect day for swapping the widget.

The blower in the Acura stopped working a few weeks back, so off to the interweb for some research and various videos led me to an educated guess that the resistor unit had failed, there was a more expensive solution, but I like to try the cheap version first.

I ordered the widget from Amazon, it was quite cheap at $24.98 including taxes and shipping.

The HVAC blower is located under the glove compartment on the RSX, so I popped the cover off to access the component. The resistor unit is there in the upper left hand side of the photo, and as usual with this sort of thing, a bugger to get access to.

Just two screws held the unit in, but removing them was rather fiddly. I would rate this as an easy job but I found removing those two bloody screws to be a test of my sanity. I had no idea at that point that putting the things back in would be double the fun.

The old widget, hopefully bad widget, was then pulled out of it's mount and this gave me good access to test the new item before wrestling those two unwilling screws back in.

Original part on the left, generic replacement on the right.

There was a moment of apprehension as I plugged the replacement in, I turned the ignition and by golly, the blower was working again. the gamble to the try the cheapest solution worked.

Happy smiles all around.

This is the original widget with the cover removed. I was going to do some testing with my multi-meter, but I realised that would be time wasted, it was much better to find and test a beer.

One last thing, when I removed the cover below the glove compartment, all three plastic snap things shattered, well they were over seventeen years old and quite brittle. Anyway, I replaced all three of them with a familiar household item, white plastic drywall E-Z anchors that work very well.

The conclusion to all of this, I understand that Honda would charge five hundred bucks or more to troubleshoot and fix something like this and I get away with twenty-five bucks and a stiff back for a few days. It was an educated guess that the electronic part would have failed over seventeen years and not the motor, it was also, excuse the pun, the path of least resistance to buy the cheap part first and try it out.

Job done.