Clicking noise HVAC changing air location

Car is 2006 Hyundai Tucson

Basically I can’t choose any vent settings for the HVAC past the Defrost + Foot option (look at pic, green works ok red clicks)
. If I do. It has a clicking sound and it never stops. This winter it was doing it to but in some rare occasions it would go through all the way to the end.

Any idea what it could be? I’m not to sure on what to go on. I’m afraid it might be like a gear that is broken or something deep inside the dash? The noise pretty comes from the middle of the dash I would say to.

my (uninformed) guess is that a flap that controls the air direction and is controlled by a gear driven motor has a problem with one or more broken teeth.

These are usually plastic gears and break easily. The computer is trying to move the flap/door and can’t due to the broken teeth, but keeps trying.

could be very expensive to repair as you may need the dash removed, always a time consuming process.

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Man that’s exactly what I had in mind to! Prob a teeth on a gear somewhere that broke off and to reach it you need to literally remove the whole dash.

One of the HVAC servo motors is failing, when you select vent or floor turn off “recirculate”, see if it is quiet then.

Does the same thing with it on or off.

Then it might be one of the mode door actuators that is failing, those can be difficult to reach.

Ah ok.

  • I was trying to find parts name like on rockauto but nada. Dealer must be the only place I can it to.

Maybe a weekend I would take the dash apart lol.

Found this. https://www.ebay.com/itm/Hyundai-2005-2009-Tucson-HVAC-Heater-Blend-Door-Actuator-Motor-97159-2E250-/231309914489

I’ll try to find more diagrams to give me an idea.

Good comments above. If you feel lucky, one failure mode that can cause this is the actuator motors losing their home position due to some glitch or another, and after that happens they don’t know how to obey a command to move to a new position. B/c they don’t know which position they are in. If so, that problem can be solved by re-homing the actuators. Usually requires a specialized scan tool that the dealership would have. Unless you are certain you are dealing with an actual failed actuator, suggest a visit to a dealership is in order before digging into the dash. Some of those actuator motors are fairly easy to access, but some can be real bears.