replacing a power lock actuator motor in a gen i prius

Make sure you get a warranty, if Pick your Part ( LKQ ) they will sell you warranty, get it, just in case the donor car's is broken or bring a Digital Volt Meter with your to check the continuity on pins 3 & 4, a 12v source would be good but PITA to carry around unless it is a RC one.

The convenient part of going to Pick your Part, you can go online to check the car inventory. More than 10 days old, it is probably stripped. I got lucky twice. I went once and found a rear actuator, after fixing it, MIL told me passenger side was broken too, went back a week later car was gone. Last week checked inventory, another was junked, found it

 

The things it's most important to test for kind of depend on the source of the part.

The pin3 to pin4 test is important if you are buying one of the brand new, eBay Chinese knockoffs, because they frequently seem to be missing the internal part that makes that switch work. Just plain missing it, as in built wrong. Otherwise, they are brand new and their motors are good.

If you are pulling used parts off an old car, chances are you're getting the real thing, and your pin3/4 test is not super important, because chances are it wasn't built with parts missing. On other hand, with a used pull part you'd be smart to test the minimum current you can feed into the motor to get it through a full cycle, because it probably has an old gasping motor, like the one you want to replace.

I find a new motor will make a (not brisk, but complete) cycle if I touch it with a constant-current supply limited to about an amp and a quarter. An old tired motor may either need a good deal more current than that before it moves much, or will actually not draw any current even at full voltage. (Sometimes that changes if you smack it right, and change how the commutator is lined up.)

-Chap

 

Thank you Dr Chapman

 

Update:

MIL's car's alarm started to have a ghost, it was locking and unlocking on it's own.

I removed the Knock Off actuator, installed the donor actuator, it cleared it right up. Geez, what a nightmare.

 

I went to the salvage yard and there were 4 Gen1 Prii, 2 of which had the actuators present. I removed the driver's side actuator from one (feeling that I should have also grabbed the other as well). With the unknown age of the donor Prius, I know that I am probably delaying the inevitable and will have to replace it in the future. The donor actuator works fine - without the alarm problems.

I was able to return the defective actuator to ebay seller TomAutoParts (the ebay price was $15.20 with free shipping) and, to their credit, they refunded the whole purchase amount (paying return shipping for me).

 

Be careful of used actuators, a lot of Gen1's have bad/tired actuators by now.
If you open your "broken" actuator and replace the electric motor with a new one that should fix it.

I have replaced dozens of motors in gen1 actuators and never had one fail.
Better to put in a new motor in your existing actuator than a 15 year old used actuator.

 

Any tips or tricks you want to share? I have a used one and a new knock off I want to gut the motor.

 

Hmm, I'm trying to keep that project straight ... was this the passenger or the driver side that you replaced when this happened? When did she notice the locking/unlocking on its own? Right as she was walking away after locking/unlocking it, or at other times when no one had been near it for a while?

Do you still have the Knock Off actuator?

-Chap

ps. also, if you keep the knock-off to open it up for the motor, you could also take a picture of the LSW switch (or the area where the LSW switch is supposed to be inside), like the picture I had in that earlier post. That way we would know whether the sinoauto problem is really the same (switch completely missing) as the one I took apart (which was from a different seller), or if the details of the defect are somehow different.

 

I second the request for tips/tricks on motor replacement.

 

This is me testing whether the broken image upthread in #17 can now be fixed by just uploading it here:

-- I can upload it, but there's no insert-thumbnail or insert-image button - I would have inserted it here --

So I guess that's better than nothing; you can click the attachment link below and see it in your browser, but it still doesn't seem quite 'supported' in xenforo the way png or jpg are.

 

.

 

Comment #51, added five years after the fact by a not-very-attentive reader of the thread, overlooks a good deal that was already considered upthread.

As this case was not about an "aftermarket part" that "had a problem", unless "had a problem" is extended to mean building an aftermarket version of a one-motor/two-switch functional module with one of the switches missing.

It is true that (a) at least one seller did pull the listing after being shown that the parts were flat-out built wrong, and at least one other seller seemed genuinely unhappy and apologetic ("I check some of this item on my hand, unfortunately all of them have this problem." post #37, "It seems like all my this product have the same problem. I'd like to refund your payment. Thanks." post #38). And that the supply of these objectively defective parts was spread across numerous eBay sellers.

The possibility that some or all of these last-tier eBay sellers were unknowing participants, and were themselves unhappy to discover they were reselling a bunch of defective merch, was already covered in post #37 and post #39.

It is only fair to allow that possibility at the level of those last-tier sellers. At the same time, a seller that was more of a knowing participant would probably still say the same thing when called out by an individual buyer. It isn't possible for an individual buyer, or even a crowdsource of individual buyers leaving reviews, to divine which of those two cases it is. The truth could probably be found if investigated by eBay, but there would have to be a way to report the need for that.

If those sellers were unknowingly sold large inventories by a manufacturer or broker that said "shoot, we built a whole run of these with the switch missing, who can we unload them on?" then those sellers were also taken advantage of by the practice, as were the ultimate buyers.

It would be hard to pull off such a practice if selling a part that had only one function; too many people would immediately notice it was broken. If you're selling something like this actuator, to people who are mostly shopping because their old one's motor wore out, then enough of them might check only that the new one's motor works, and not catch on right away that one of its other two functions was completely broken because the part was flat-out missing.

Usually the "you're buying an aftermarket part, you assume the risk that it maybe performs less well than OEM" warning is not extended to "you're supposed to expect that whole functions are broken right out of the box because it was built with parts missing."

But, clearly, that is something you have to watch out for, and be careful to thoroughly test on the bench, before investing the labor of installing one of these parts in a car.

It's clear that eBay's marketplace does get used in this way. The cliché is "what you can measure, you can manage"; a shortcoming of eBay's reporting system is it completely prevents reporting any suspicion about this practice as long as a seller sent your $16 back as a cost of doing business—thus ensuring eBay can't measure this problem.

 

OK, so, you were unhappy with a single purchase you made on eBay, in which the seller sold you a defective aftermarket (not counterfeit) part probably without their knowledge, and you would get a refund if you asked for it, but you chose not to ask for it. You, based on a single complaint, want eBay to immediately halt the transactions of an experienced seller who otherwise has very happy customers. What you fail to understand is that eBay is a third-party platform, and for it to function, it needs to protect both the buyer and seller; otherwise, the whole system would break down. Can improvements be made to the system? Sure. However, I don't see why you have never moved beyond a $16 purchase for which you would have spent $173.77 if you got an OEM part. This is life—things don't always work, which is in fact a gross understatement, but eBay works well for most people for most of the time.

 

You persist in failing to read the content of this thread, including the reports of multiple participants and tests conducted on parts from multiple sellers, or deliberately misrepresenting what you have read.

I certainly use eBay myself and it works well for me a lot of the time too.

A realistic understanding of the lay of the land helps make it work out well more often. For example, if I were looking to buy an eBay-sold knockoff of an OEM part at 1/10th the price, and I didn't have a month to deal with returns and retries, I might start by buying more than one (the experience of this thread would put a wise number around 4 or 5), test them all on the bench, install a good one if found, then return any bad ones as time permits.

If there were more good ones, it might be possible to resell those on eBay at a profit, by explaining that you had done the value-add of actually testing them.

 

No worries, I think enough has been said by both of us. I was trying to make the point that eBay needs to protect both the buyer and seller for the whole system to work.

 

It's possible to advocate that point without making misrepresentations.

 

I don't think I have, but you are entitled to your opinion.

 

2. I made several purchases. Others made several purchases. We compared notes. We communicated politely and fairly with the respective sellers. We explained to the sellers how to test their inventory. Some of them did, and reported they were sorry and all of their inventory failed the test. At least one of them voluntarily delisted the item.
   
   All of that is documented above in this thread, which you either did or didn't read.
   
3. That's what the sellers said of course, and it may have been true. If so, they themselves had been taken advantage of by upstream suppliers. Or they were less innocent than that. Both are possible; I am in no position to investigate or make that call.
   
4. False, as documented upthread.
   
5. False, as documented upthread.
   
6. I wanted nothing of the kind, as documented upthread.
   
   If there had been a way to bring the issues to eBay's attention, it would have been something more like: "hey guys. There's this situation. A lot of these parts that are demonstrably defective (here's how you can test them and see) are being sold, by a lot of different sellers. Maybe the sellers themselves are being taken advantage of. The larger issue might be going under your radar because individual purchasers are all getting refunds if they spot the problem, and no one is looking further. Maybe it's worth using some of your resources to find out what the story is.
   
   But of course eBay's reporting interface is designed so there isn't any way to bring such an issue to their attention, so that didn't happen.

You can get a pass on (3), because "probably without their knowledge" is at least in the realm of possibility; it's not obviously false. (1), (2), (4), (5), and (6) are either things you would have known were false had you read the thread before posting, or you did read the thread and knew they were false when you wrote them. The first case is laziness, the second is dishonesty, only you know which one applies.

• "Ah, I see there were some details upthread that I missed, sorry for adding confusion." —ok
• "Ok, I get that sometimes there's more going on than one unhappy customer, but sellers have troubles too." —sure, ok
• "Whether my misrepresentations were misrepresentations is a matter of opinion." —really not ok

I moved on immediately to other things, like (1) documenting for others on PriusChat how to bench-test these items so as to know whether you've received a good or defective one, and not waste time installing a defective one in the car and (2) documenting the specific aspects of eBay's resolution process that explain how this particular kind of issue is able to go under their radar, because being aware of that can be helpful in having a satisfactory experience on eBay.

At the risk of repetition, I do buy on eBay myself, and usually with satisfactory results. Part of that is because I do so with informed expectations.