Steering Column Tilt Motor Failure LX470

[RoderickGI]

G'Day folk,

I've searched for other people who have had a Steering Column Tilt Motor fail on a Lexus LX470 (mine is a 1998, 110,000 Km). Plenty of people have had failures of the tilt motor on other Lexus vehicles, but not many on the LX470. I only found one! The design in the LX470 is quite different to other Lexus'.

Anyway, mine failed some time ago, but the telescoping motor still works fine, and the steering column tilt was in a safe position to drive, so I have left it until now. I pulled the motor out during the weekend and found that I could not turn the motor by hand, even though it is a direct drive with no gearing at all. Suspicious and curious I pulled the motor apart and I can see why the motor is impossible to turn. A very strong concave disc spring pushes rotating and non-rotating parts together very firmly. In fact a disc with a ring on it like mylar contacts a set of fingers attached to the body. Frankly I can't see how this motor would ever have worked, but it did. It uses induction or something, and has no brushes. It must produced quite a bit of torque to overcome the friction designed into it! Actually I'm a bit suspicious that my Lexus dealer may have pulled the motor apart and put it back together wrong, but I can't really work out a better assembly sequence that wouldn't cause the friction between parts. The bearig is fine, and the whole motor is quite a highly engineered unit, with very accurate machining tolerances. It looks like the motor could be reconditioned, but I can't find any information on it let alone parts breakdowns or spare parts lists!

I had a quote of AU$470 from Lexus Australia sometime ago for a replacement motor. I have now found out that it is the same motor as used in the Landcruiser, so I can use the cheaper Toyota part at AU$321.20.

The part number is Toyota 89231-60010, Denso 110750-0011 7T.

Anyone else has had such a failure, and if so, was the electric tilt motor is repairable? How much did it cost you, and when did you have it done?

PS: Yes, I could just put the motor back in with a better tilt position, but I like the automatic tilt and telescoping of the steering column, and I want it back!

 

[RoderickGI]

For future readers, I have replaced the tilt motor with a unit from Toyota. The updated part number was 89231-60022. There were only minor changes to the design.

The installation was not without challenges. First of all, mucking around with the old motor had resulted in the fault codes being set, so that the "Tilt and Telescopic ECU" would not try to run the motor. This meant that the new motor didn't run when I first plugged it in, which was a little disconcerting. However disconnecting the batteries for half an hour reset the ECU and fixed that problem.

I also found that the motor had to be screwed in to the threaded adjusting nut exactly the correct number of turns in order to have the steering wheel tilt the full range. The motor only does three revolutions and then stops, in either direction. By correctly fitting the motor it stops before the circlips on the threaded screw hit the threaded adjusting nut. Correct fitment means that the motor doesn't try to continue rotating after it has hit the hard stop of the circlips, which could result in triggering a fault code, or damaging the motor.

I couldn't remove the threaded adjusting nut from the steering column to clean it out, and since I wanted remove most of the old grease including in the adjusting nut, I screwed the old motor into the nut and cleaned away the grease it pushed out. Since I didn't care about the old motor, I screwed it in as far as it would go, and about half a turn more, which of course rotated the spindle in the motor. The spindle of both the old and new motors can't be turned by hand.

When I had unscrewed the old motor I plugged it in again and surprise surprise it worked. Not as well as the new one, but it did rotate three full turns in each direction, the same as the new one.

So, either the old motor always worked, but the fault codes were set so that the ECU didn't try to run it. I don't think this was the case though, because I had had the batteries disconnected for extended periods previously, and the tilt motor never started working. The other possibility is that by pulling it apart and reassembling, then rotating it half a turn, the motor was reset back into a functioning starting point. That is, previously it had been rotated out of its range of operation somehow, perhaps because of an overload cause by lack of lubrication, and rotating it back into its range of operation enable it to work again.

I did have Lexus look at the motor once because it was a bit noisy, so maybe they pulled it out, incorrectly reinstalled it, leading to an overload, or they just rotated the motor out of its operating range. They looked at it a second time when it stopped working, and declared that the motor had failed. Now I know better.

Anyway, I installed the new motor, since I had it, and the old one can be a spare, or get recycled some time. The lack of solutions offered in this thread would imply that this is a rare issue. Maybe other Lexus dealers know how to grease a thread, and correctly use the diagnosis tools available to them. The tilt motor seems to be pretty robust if understood and treated right.

 

[agaisin]

Well - you can add me to the list of failed tilt motors. I have done zero diagnostics, just realized today on my way home from a 5 hour drive that it wasn't tilting up/down. Telescoping works ok but pushing the tilt button up or down does nothing, it's not even trying to moe up or down.

I've got 130k on the clock for reference. Will have to see if resetting ecu's does anything for me.

Much thanks to the previous posters on the parts and tips!

Sent from my iPhone using IH8MUD

 

[agaisin]

OK - 'reset' ecu and tilt still doesn't function (telescope does). I plugged in mini vci with Techstream and confirmed a few things:
1) there were no DTC's thrown from the Tilt&Telescope ECU
2) using data monitoring confirmed that when I pushed the switch up/down/in/out that the ECU was picking up each signal correctly so it's not the switch itself.

I guess it's time to order the replacement tilt motor...

Also, for anyone interested in Techstream info, I've pointed this out in other threads but confirmed again today with this ECU that the ($200+) Tactrix OpenPort 2.0 cable VIM interface doesn't allow me to access many of the ECUs like mirror, tilt/telescope, power window etc. On the other hand, the "knockoff" cheapo ($30) mini vci cable allows me to access those same ECUs and then some. I was able to use the active test on the tilt/telescope ECU as well to push a button on Techstream and see the steering wheel telescope in/out. Also, as a bonus, once again it was clear as day side by side that the mini vci cable performs significantly quicker than the tactrix cable. I sit there waiting for almost every screen using the tactrix and with the mini vci it's at least twice as quick.

 

[parnoren]

My tilt motor just died. Tried finding a thread with removal instructions without luck so I'm here wondering if anybody else has done this and if it was easy or hard.

 

[agaisin]

My tilt motor just died. Tried finding a thread with removal instructions without luck so I'm here wondering if anybody else has done this and if it was easy or hard.

I replaced tilt and telescoping motor at same time, bought parts from amayama for < 150 each motor. Remember it being easier than I expected, and believe I used this thread: DIY: Telescoping Column Motor Removal/Repair

 

[Drogon]

I was thinking of replacing mine.

I had the dealer turn off the telescoping function, because when I took my key out, the steering wheel sounded like it had gas and was struggling to tuck itself in.