Thank you SO MUCH for posting this! It got me out of a really bad place.
I helped my youngest daughter find her 1st car, a lovely black 2012 Lounge Twinair with low mileage and service history. Now I know cars (I restore classics, have built race/rally cars, do most of my own servicing and repairs in my workshop, etc), so I carefully checked it out, including testing that the climate control system was gassed and blew cold air. What I didn't check (and have been kicking myself for ever since) was that it blew warm air. It was a rather hot spell when we viewed, checked and bought the car, but that's no excuse - I should have tested this. As it turned out, the CC unit was ONLY cold.
When we took it out for her second learner drive in the evening of day 2 of ownership, it was a bit chilly but we couldn't get the car warm. No matter what we set the CC control to, all we got was icy aircon output. After some research and calling around, it seemed that the whole unit needed replacing and this was a massive job that would effectively write the car off, as the cost was pretty much what my daughter paid of the whole car, using all her savings from babysitting and part-time jobs. I tried to get in touch with the dealer who sold us the car but he was not interested.
I was contemplating replacing the unit myself. Doors and seats removal, strip out the instruments/controls, upper and lower dashbpard etc, but finding the spare time to do this soon was going to be a challenge and my daughter really needed the car to practice ahead of her test. Then I found your post, linking to the potential fix on the Abarth site. One hour later the car was fixed and the digital climate control was working with both cold and hot sources.
You saved the day! Thanks again.
Ian
Some additional points to note:
* This is very likely to affect all these cars with climate control (such a poorly designed component will inevitably fail) but it is an easy fix, using common tools, as long as you take your time and are careful (you might only get one shot at this). Took me about 1h to complete.
* As you have to remove the driver's knee airbags (2x torx bolts on the bottom edge then pull up and out - bit of a pain to refit), I advise disconnecting the car battery, just in case. This is good practice anyway and avoids the potential for airbag surprises.... I only reattached the battery when I needed to during motor testing and setting (below), and once the job was completed.
* I removed the broken stub of the hot/cold flap's shaft from within the white nylon toothed actuator (the crescent-shaped toothed white gear pictured in the Abarth forum instructions) and drilled a small (3mm?) hole through the centre of the actuator from the motor side (i.e. through longer star-shaped tube), suitable for a long thin self-tapping screw with a head small enough to fit inside the shaft (which I had to file down a bit to fit). Then I held the actuator in place on the remains of the broken stub of the airbox flap whilst I drilled a corresponsing smaller centre hole in the flap shaft for the self-tapper to screw into. This allowed me to screw the actuator onto the shaft whilst working on the fix, ensuring everything was aligned, and adding an additional attachment between the actuator and shaft, as well as holding it in place when you reassemble.
* If it is hard to work out what position to attach the toothed actuator to the shaft (the visible end of mine was too damaged to be sure of how it aligned with the actuator), you can either use the screw I mentioned above, or something like thin nose pliers, to rotate the broken shaft of the heater flap fully clockwise (cold). Then you can attach the actuator in its fully clockwise position, hard against the end stop (a raised plastic peg on the body of the airbox).
* I didn't have any roll pins to hand (as suggested in the Abarth forum). I could have ordered some but instead I used 2x 1.5mm split pins, slid through the 1.5mm holes I drilled through the actuator. Do this from the flap side, making sure you drill where there is the most material, i.e. in the hollow between shaft flutes (as shown in the Abarth forum instructions). Once I had drilled the 1.5mm holes in the actuator, I fitted it to the flap shaft with the self-tapping screw mentioned above (ensuring both were set in the full cold/clockwise position). With the screw holding the actuator to the flap shaft, I slowly manually rotated it from full cold to full hot, to check it had the full travel between the 2 stop pegs on the airbox body (also hearing the flap close at each end position). I then returned the actoator to the full cold position before drilling through the 1.5mm actuator holes into/through the flap/shaft. Then I slid in the 2x split pins. Essentially, you can use anything (strong steel, obviously) that will poke through the 2x holes through the actuator into the flap shaft, as detailed on the Abarth forum. As long as whatever you use is a snug fit and cannot work its way through the actuator to drop inside the air box (e.g. the looped head of a split pin, or the tightness of a roll pin prevents this), then you will be fine.
* Check the motor is working before you refit it. With the motor's wires connected, but the motor not fitted, turn on the ignition and set the temperature control to full hot and then all the way down to full cold, watch the motor during this process to (hopefully) see it rotate smoothly from fully clockwise to anticlockwise. If it is "sticky" and not smooth, open the motor and clean / regrease as suggested on the Abarth forum. Mine was fine.
* Without being attached to the actuator, the motor actually goes further than full cold/hot position end stops on the airbox allow. This means that with the motor at either end of its range you won't be able to align everything when refitting. So, set the temperature to roughly what the air temperature is in the car (e.g. for me it was 20C yesterday, so I set the climate control to 20). This will set the motor somewhere in the middle of its range. Don't worry about exactly where it is, the actuator shaft is keyed, so the motor will only fit onto it in one position. When you are ready to refit everything, slide the motor onto the actuator shaft, and with the control flap/shaft engaged in the motor, rotate the motor until the mounting points (2 screws and one locating peg) are aligned with the mountings on the side of the air box. This will ensure the flap, motor and climate controls are all aligned.
* Refitting the 2x torx bolts that were removed to take out the 2x brackets for access (as detailed in the Abarth forum instructions) is a pain. They are easy to cross thread, especially as the access through the steering wheel adustment lever hole is not a straight line to the bolt heads. It's best if you can get your hand in and start them off with your fingers, but it's tight, even with small hands. A flexible shaft driver or a universal joint adapter might help.
