2000 Tacoma heater/AC blower motor cleaning yields rubber gasket material

First, I'd like to thank everyone who posted about cleaning out all kinds of stuff from their blower motor fan (dead mice, leaves, etc). I decided to post a new one rather than adding to older threads.

I dropped my blower motor (super easy, 3 screws) because of a rapping noise like a baseball card in bicycle spokes. I expected leaves from our Fall leaf drop. Instead I found a piece of rubber gasket. After putting the motor back in, all was great until I could hear another piece moving along in the system. It landed in the blower fan and made the same noise. Dropped it again and removed that one. All good so far.

Any thoughts on where this gasketing is coming from? Perhaps from the ducting under the dash? I looked at the gaskets for the hood and they seemed intact. Is this gasketing something that I should replace (once I find it)?

I think I'm going to remove the cover on the air intake at the bottom of the windshield and clean the heck out of it. Just to keep more debris from ting in the system.

I should say that my 1st gen v6 5spd has 410k miles and I just replaced the clutch for the 1st time. Input shaft bearing on tranny is making noise, I guess I should have rebuilt it then, but we only have one vehicle for now and I couldn't take the time.

Here are photos of the rubber. Any thoughts? TIA.

 

I need to do this to mine. could you link the threads talking about this?

 

Put the phrase "dead mouse in blower motor " in the search box on the forum, and you should get a number of threads. Here's one, https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/dead-mouse-in-cabin-air-intake.639185/page-2
And another: https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads...and-clean-out-heater-with-mouse-in-it.396857/
I hope this helps, dropping the fan was easy. I didn't bother to unplug it. I never figured out where the rubber came from. Somewhere down the line, I guess.
Good luck.

 

aaaah finding the right search phrase is half the game. Thanks!

 

No problem!

 

That's old windshield urethane from a guy who replaced it and cleaned up sloppily. They take off the windshield cowl so they can cut the old windshield off the truck. Leaves behind little shards of urethane as they cut down to the factory windshield frame surface. Under that cowl they remove when doing this job is where the HVAC intake is hiding, he probably missed those slices during cleanup and the blower brought em in.

 

Thanks, that makes sense! Also a relief. I was worried that I had gaskets coming apart.
Alan