Wildlife can be a real problem for cars sometimes, especially when
electrical insulation gets nibbled on.
In the Northeast where I am we have a lot of chipmunks, which tend to
live on acorns and other tree-nuts like their bigger cousins the
squirrels.
Chipmunks are also burrowing animals, which make holes and tunnels under
any handy object like rocks and house walls, and they love crawling into
tight little spaces such as the numerous
nooks and crannies found all over any modern car.
Fortunately their aim is to simply nest in a protected place and not
eat what they find there, but rather bring their food in with them and
then let the cracked-open shells pile up.
Engine air filter boxes are a particularly common target, and these li'l buggers will crawl all the way up a long intake snorkel to set up shop in the air box. I don't quite understand what the appeal is, as the intake tract of a gas car usually smells fairly strongly of fuel. Maybe they just don't mind that, for the sake of having a safe and often warmer place to sack out. After finding a few shell fragments in the bottom of the Prius' air box I added a bit of wire-mesh screen across the intake opening, because if left alone the critters will eventually start tearing the air filter itself apart. The Kona doesn't have an engine air filter but it does have typical car body construction, giving free passage up through the fender areas into the whole under-hood area. I had already found a few nut fragments kicking around on top of the reduction gear and even the charger. But far more disturbing, only a few months into ownership I realized that every time I raised the hood I could hear acorns rolling around *inside* its structure as they fell toward the rear edge. It was rather obvious how they'd gotten there; the hood has four fairly large holes into the structure along the inside of the front edge and generous space under them when the hood is closed. It was time to get the interior hood liner off and see what could be done. |
I only un-did the clips at the windshield edge and the sides,and let the
liner flop down still held at the front edge of the hood.
And the evidence of chipmunk domesticity was immediate -- a big nest-ball
dropped out, which had evidently been built from foam chewed out of the
thickness of the liner, combined with bits of the fiberglass insulation
on the nearby basement wall from the
Roxul job.
The negative space of this was a big pit munched out of the liner, stopping
just short of penetrating out through the visible black fiber membrane.
The narrowish slits in the stiffening struts are apparently wide enough to
let a chipmunk through, so the path from the large holes along the front
edge to inside here is fairly obvious.
Some of the acorns must have been left inside the struts, since that's
where I heard the rolling.
I can't quite understand why anything would want to sleep on fiberglass, but maybe it doesn't bother a fuzzy critter's skin like it does ours. |
An alternative approach might have been to build blocks of some material
attached down to the large flat expanse of plastic around the front of
the hood compartment to align closely enough under the holes when closed,
but for now the direct approach was good enough.
I saw no way to get the existing acorns *out* of the hood short of removing
it entirely and trying to shake them back toward the front edge, so I didn't
bother worrying about it.
I had another part of the project that seemed more urgent, which was to also
keep them out of the cabin air intake.
That's another common spot for rodent infestations, and car forums are full
of stories about shredded cabin air filters and nests and flying bits of
poop and dead mouse bits all through the ventilation system when someone
unthinkingly turns on the fan after a car has been sitting for a while.
I had thought about this for the Prius back in the day, but due to a weird dual-layer body construction where the intake sits, it's impossible to get to in any convenient way. Fortunately, the easy defense is to leave the climate system in "recirculate" before shutting the car down, which blocks off the fresh-air inlet and stays in that position. Here's the kicker with the Kona: when it shuts down, it *always* opens the air intake to the outside no matter how it was set before. The controller logic specifically does that by running the flap motor, it's not like it just falls open on some kind of spring arrangement. I thought about trying to add a switch in line with the motor to disable this behavior, but the actuator and its wiring is buried *way* deep inside the dash. Not only that, each HVAC actuator motor has a potentiometer on the output to make *sure* it has moved where expected, so preventing that would likely starts throwing some kind of error. So yeah, that's FIVE wires to every flap control -- motor leads driven by an H-bridge, + and ground to the ends of the pot, and the pot wiper. It's perverse, excessively complicated, and downright stupid as applied to the intake in question. It wasn't immediately clear if trying to get at the wiring somewhere else and pull some hack like reversing the motor *and* pot leads so the functionality would be opposite -- that would be one answer, but I wasn't really up for tearing the whole dash apart *again* just for this. The alternative answer would be screening off the intake if possible, so it was time to investigate the area under the wiper cowl which I had not done yet. It's useful to know what's in there, because if nothing else it wants to get cleaned out every so often. |
The wipers need to come off; their nuts are under simple rubber caps that just pry out. 14 mm nuts, like on the Prius, but less complex since both wipers are a simple pivot instead of a crazy dual-lever system. The arms sit on the same type of conical splined shafts, which one must be careful to re-seat properly and not strip. |
_H* 200618