Broken Louvered fresh air vent,

[howardpdavis]

Hi, Can anyone tell me how I might be able to refix one of the louver  blades on the dashboard fresh air vent. While cleaning the chrome the smallest chrome blade fell/was pushed out from the rotating chrome air grill. I have retrieved the blade and it is not damaged. Is it possible to easily remove the rotating grill to effect the repair from the rear ?, it seems impossible to replace it from the front.
Thanks
Howard

[Raymond]

I haven't had to fix the blade, but the vents do unbolt from behind.  At least that's how I had them out while the entire dash was apart.  If you are talking about the one next to the glove box, you could do it in a couple of hours.  If it's the one next to the instrument cluster, you have a lot to remove to get to it.

[mdsalemi]

Howard,

I believe there is a strong possibility that you have some damage somewhere.  The nature of how these are held in place almost dictates that.  Somehow, of course the possibility exists that the lowest vane has pushed out somehow with no damage anywhere...

See the attached photo; unfortunately it is only of one side.

From this photo, you can see that on one side here, the side in view, the vanes are held in at two places: one, by a "rack" that has them all moving together.  There is a "pin" cast into the end of the vane that slips into this rack.  Below that, another cast-in pin slips into a hole in the sheet-metal base, and is held in place by an extremely complex bent spring wire.  On the opposite side, another pin rests in a "boss" on the sheet metal base, and it too, is held in by a similarly complex bent spring wire.

For a vane to pop out, something broke, like one of the cast-in pins on the vane.  Or, somehow the wire let go at this point.  However, if the wire let go on the far side (the side of the assembly not visible in my photo) I would expect more than one vane would have come off.

In any case, I hope this helps you understand what you might be looking at when you attack the problem.

[George Des]

It is always these seemingly simple little things that will drive you nuts with these cars. Unfortunately, it is usually a little piece of a larger part that was never intended to be fixed but rather replaced. In these situations, it is either buy a new part or if it is NLA, try to find one off a donor car. If someone has the skill and dexterity to use something like the E-Machine Shop program you can sometimes have a needed component made, but then your stuck with having to order the parts in quantity to make it worth it. I ran into this problem when trying to rebuild the large style fuel pump. If you have a broken tab washer or a missing woodruff key, you know how maddening it can be to try to fabricate one of these parts free-hand and get it to work properly. Out of shear frustration I looked for a better way to make these two parts.  My first experience at using E-Machine Shop was fabricating these two parts. I had to order  100 pieces of each! I was able to recoup a large part of my investment by assembling kits for others that inlcude them because these two parts seem to be the source of problems with all the failed large style pumps. Perhaps there are other little parts like these that could also be made in this manner.

I have seen the side vents listed on Ebay recently, but like anything that is specific to the W113s, sellers are listing them at astronomical prices and "junk" yards just don't seem to have many cars from the 113 era anymore!

[howardpdavis]

Thank you for your comments and advice, and particularly Michael for the very helpful picture. All the pins are still in the vane, but I can see how difficult it would be to reinsert it without complete access. I now understand how complicated this simple appearing vent is !
I think that I am, very unfortunately, stuck with what is going to be a very expensive repair, getting a replacement part (expensive ++) and very expensive to fit taking into account the work to remove the part and replace in dashboard- it is the vent next to the glovebox- so some good news there I suppose.