NOLACLS

Does anyone know WHY actuators go out...has that mystry ever ben solved or is it just sometime the part its self is just defective??

scalbert

Without pulling a defective one apart it would be hard to say. They are not sophisticated devices.

vuduvida

when mine went out, the dealer said that a little piece broke off, jammed in the gears and eventually wore-out the actuator motor.

NOLACLS

Yeah thats what I was thinking...that its something with that part and not something else in the car shorting it out. See that what I tried to beat in the heads of my local acura dealer. Mine went out 3 times on my 03 but none on my 01 so this time I had to re explane what the problem was and all...we will just leave it at it was a big pain in the ass. I just wanted to check and see if the problem was ever solved.

Thanks man!

vuduvida

I wonder why dealers are so clueless about this part? I had to go into the dealer's service bay and explain to the tech what I thought was wrong, show him where the part was, that it wasn't turning. We even went to his office and were browsing a-cl.com together looking for Chod's FAQ that explains how to troubleshoot it. :shakehd: Since we'd spent so much time troubleshooting it, at least they told me what they found after opening it.

scalbert

Try being the first one to uncover this try and get the dealer to fix it when there is no supporting data.

NOLACLS

My problem was the guy who I explaned it to the first time...and who just ordered it for me over the phone the 2nd time is no longer there. I got a brand new guy to seal with that just started at acura. And the fuked up thing about it is the guy who does the work on my car was like ohh yeah I rember that...it went out again. The little fuker that was helping me was pissing me off to...I was like just go look under the hood of that car rightt here and rev it...you will see what is wrong. He is like umm sir you need to tell me what the drivable difference..so I tell him...they drive it and say it seems to pull just fin. Ohhh man dont get me going again...I had a long long day yesterday. They are now waiting on the part so they can see if that fixed it.....you fuken tools I AM TELLING YOU IT WILL

I just hope it dont go again because I will be pissed if I have to go through this again!

NOLACLS

Yeah no kidding! They told me I am the only one they have ever seen or heard of with this problem...I told them thats because it dosnt throw any codes and most cl people just have a cl...they dont DRIVE a cl and notice they are missing a lot of power!

vuduvida

wow, that must've taken forever to figure out. Thanks for doing the groundwork! The info definitely helped me- I wouldn't have even know about it if it wasn't for this site.


My tech checked for codes also (and didn't find any). What he did (finally) was to try to manually activate the actuator by directly connecting wires from the battery into the actuator harness. Once he saw it wasn't activating that way, he agreed that the unit was bad and put in a new one.

scalbert

Back in August of 2000 is when I first found the problem. It took diagnostics by me, providing dyno plots, schematics from the Helms manual and testing on other cars to get them to beleive me. At first they said that a code should have been. But thankfully they had a pretty good tech that could comprehend outside of what was normal to them.

After providing supporting infomation to my case he did some testing and found that I was correct. It was fixed the next day after the part was ordered. That is when I did the intial write up on this problem back in the old days before ACL.

NOLACLS

Ohhh man THANK YOU! I didnt realize you were the first with the problem. Like tinman if it wasnt for you or this site I would be driving only part of my type S.

See thats the trick...you have to get the techs to actualy THINK...like hey look under this hood and you see it move...then look at mine...it dont...something has to be wrong...but ohhhh noooo we can just look at it sir...there has to be a driveablity issue that we can recreate. I could have smack some people yesterday!