December 23, 2013

Englewood, FL

A few weeks back we began noticing that the mat on the driver’s side of my car was damp at times.  At first we thought the somehow the water was getting in when it rained.  But it hadn’t rained in a while and the mat was still wet so we figured out that it had to be the air conditioner. 

Monte went on-line to troubleshoot the problem.  He learned that it is a very common occurrence in my model car.  He also found out that it would cost around $700 to fix because the repair is very labor intensive.

So Monte put on his mechanic’s hat again and did the repair himself.

 

 

 

 

Well here goes another Monte does it again!  After discovering the problem I did some research and came up with this solution to again fix a very poor design flaw.  This is a common problem with this automaker.  After a time the gasket around the air conditioner drain breaks down and lets water leak back down inside of the driver’s compartment flooding the floor of the vehicle.  Great for getting a foot bath, but bad for keeping the inside of the car dry.  This was an attempt at humor, Oh Well.

To start I had to remove the battery, battery bracket and hoses in the way to gain access to the drain.  I had to pull back the firewall material to see what I had to do.  I blew out around the gasket with air and took some dum dum tape to put around the pipe so it could not leak back to the inside of the car. 

 

 

 

Dum dum tape is a butyl black sticky tape which is like tar paper in tape form.  You can see from the pictures what is involved. 

You first have to stick your arm up to your armpit and put the tape in place.  A very simple fix to an expensive problem. 

 

Mitsubishi recommends that the dash be removed, air conditioner unit be removed from the inside of the car, drained of all Freon and replace a $2.00 foam gasket around the hole going through the firewall. 

 

Then in a few years you get to take it back the dealer and donate another $700 to $1000.00 all over again. 

 All it takes is a couple of hours to do the same fix I did.  A no brainer, just think of all the money I can now spend at camping world now…