recently did a ~1,500mile roadtrip from Sacramento area to San Diego, well on the return trip around Fresno or so I noticed that my A/C wasn't putting out any air. When I turn on the A/C I can see and feel the spike in rpms so it appears that its still working, but no air is coming into the cab. Any ideas whats wrong and how I can fix it? Its becoming rather uncomfortable to drive around anywhere but on freeways.

 

Is the fan running? Heater work? With A/C on and fan at low does the compressor switch cycle on/off? You can tell if the engine speeds up a little when its on and the engine will slow when it's off. During normal operation, it should cycle on...off...on...off over a minute or so.

 

So it sounds as though your compressor is still coming on but your fan is not blowing.
If thats the case, start with checking fuses, then move on to checking the blower motor itself, sometimes hitting them will get them to work for a bit.
It may also be your resistor, I don't know the wiring off the top of my head but most vehicles have power flow through a resister all levels but the high setting so it will only work on that one setting.

 

I don't believe the fan is running, nothing comes out of the vents but the engine definitly revs up a bit when I turn on the a/c, even when I turned on the heater
thats what I suspect.
it doesn't work on any of the settings
I guess I'll check the fuses and see if any are blown, after that how should I go about checking the fan and motor?

 

The blower motor is the fan, you will need a meter to check for power and ground going to the motor, if you have both, your blower motor is bad.
Like I said before, if you try hitting on the blower motor, sometimes it will start to work for a bit which will also tell you the motor is bad.

 

reached under the dash and smacked the motor and it made a gurgling sound lie it was trying to work for a second then stopped

 

Easy fix:

http://www.4crawler.com/4x4/CheapTri...ml#MotorRepair

 

you can check the resister easily, its just one screw in the bottom of the blower under the dash. That was the problem when the blower in my 4runner quit working. On the other hand, in Colin's tacoma, his actual blower motor went out, but we picked up a replacement at the junkyard for $25.

I love 4crawlers write ups, but in some cases its just easier to put in a junk yard part and get back on the road than to break something down to replace a few brushes/parts like that!

 

just pulled out the motor, was surprisingly easy. checked rockauto and can get a new motor for 38 bucks, or I found a whole assembly on ebay for 30 http://www.ebay.com/itm/84-85-86-87-...#ht_500wt_1054
what do you guys think? and noticed while looking at other generation motors that a lot of the newer motors look the same, are they interchangeable?