Blower fan making putting sound

[Ben824]

97 XJ 4.0L auto 4x4. The blower fan for the heating and AC has starting making a putting sound that kinda sounds similar to a small 2 cycle engine on lawn equipment. It is worse when on heat than cold and it gets worse the faster the fan setting. This is extremely annoying and I really want to fix the problem. Any ideas?

 

[Matthew Currie]

Could be the motor itself - bad bearing or the like, or it could be that something has fallen down and is rubbing against the fan. The blower motors on XJ's are dead easy to take out. Done from the engine side of the firewall, three screws. You may have to take a couple of things out of the way, but it's so simple to do that it's worthwhile to open it up and see what's going on.

Unfortunately the bearings are sealed, so there's little you can do to extend the life of one that's going bad. The fan itself is clipped on, and made of plastic, very easy to break trying to get it off, and the motor is held together by rivets instead of bolts, so about all you can safely do is try to sneak a little oil into the bearing underneat the fan.

 

[DezertTitan]

We had one of our work trucks making that noise. Was a freightliner, so diff setup I'm sure. Turned out it some papers got sucked up from under the dash and were rubbing the fan blades. Didn't think that could happen, we thought maybe something was going out. Anyways, just an idea. Could be something real simple. Hopefully it is!

 

[Ben824]

Thanks for the ideas! I am gonna try and find out what is wrong sometime this week and a get a chance. Glad I atleast have a starting point now!

 

[200K XJ]

At least yours isn't like mine, making a howling noise like a sea lion being raped by a donkey! The noise goes away as soon as the warm air starts flowing through it but It's embarrassing because I forget about it after the noise is gone and leave the fan on when I park so after a few hours or the next day I start my Jeep and it's sea lion rape time again! But I know whats wrong with mine... bad bearings. Just need to get off my lazy butt and replace the blower motor.

 

[robsjeepxj]

:laugh2: :laugh2: :laugh2: That's got to be the funniest thing I've read on here ever! Pretty accurate too although I can't say I've seen it to know for sure.

 

[Ivan]

Could be the motor itself - bad bearing or the like, or it could be that something has fallen down and is rubbing against the fan. The blower motors on XJ's are dead easy to take out. Done from the engine side of the firewall, three screws. You may have to take a couple of things out of the way, but it's so simple to do that it's worthwhile to open it up and see what's going on.

Unfortunately the bearings are sealed, so there's little you can do to extend the life of one that's going bad. The fan itself is clipped on, and made of plastic, very easy to break trying to get it off, and the motor is held together by rivets instead of bolts, so about all you can safely do is try to sneak a little oil into the bearing underneat the fan.

Not sure about pre '96s, but if you have AC on your '97 and later XJ; you are going to have the AC discharged, so that you can move the AC Accumulator out of the way, so that you can then access the blower motor from the engine bay as you descibe...

 

[mhopton]

Not sure about pre '96s, but if you have AC on your '97 and later XJ; you are going to have the AC discharged, so that you can move the AC Accumulator out of the way, so that you can then access the blower motor from the engine bay as you descibe...

I did not have to do this on my 99 classic w/ ac. It took some wiggling but the oem fan came out and the new VDO fan went in. 1 hour job.

 

[Ben824]

The accumulator is def in the way on my 97 but i think if I unbolted the bracket holding it up i could move it just enough to squeeze the fan by it.

But good news for me, as of right now the sound has gone away entirely so I am thinking that something probably got sucked up in it and now has fallen out. I'm keeping my fingers crossed because I really don't wanna spend the money right now to replace the fan. I am going to look into finding some mesh material to put in front of the area where the fan is under the dash since I removed the plastic guard to make removing the connectors for the door easier to get to for when I remove the doors on a nice sunny day.