2001 Ford Focus water

First of all , the clutch slave cyl is not at pedals , it is in gearbox .Check bulkhead drains under bonnet , in corners are not blocked . Then check this from another forum re. water leak .




First off, the leak is due to water getting inside the air conditioner's air intake. Water runs down the passenger side windshield and flows between the windshield and the crowl (the crowl is the big flat plastic seal connected to the bottom of the windshield). Therefore, Ford put in a gutter on the bottom-side of the crowl that is supposed to collect this water and move it elsewhere to a safe place.

The leak occurs because this gutter doesn't have a big enough lip on it to keep water from flowing over the gutter (similar to how a bent-down rooftop gutter would overflow when it rains). This water flows into the air conditioner's air intake, which is located directly beneath the crowl. Ford should have fixed this problem! They've had six generations or more cars with this same problem.

Instead of fixing this gutter (by adding a bigger lip on it), I decided to start with the easier route of covering half of the air intake with packaging tape. To do this, you need to lift up the hood of the car and lift up the crowl. There are 3 clips on the crowl that need to be unclipped and you can lift up the crowl afterwards (with a bit of wiggling) at least enough where you can get your arm underneath it.

Once you have the crowl up enough, you will see the air intake covered by a grating. I simply cleaned this surface and placed packaging tape over half of the grating (the half that is towards the center of the car). You need to make sure that the tape covers the grating and the grating's housing so that there are no gaps such that water can still flow into the air intake. I actually took out the entire housing so that it would be easier to clean and get to, but this is a little bit difficult and requires a wrench.

Also, I took a cheap plastic mechanical pencil (or some rod) and taped that down the center of the grating so that this would provide a lip so that water cannot get from the taped half of the grating to the untaped half of the grating. This might not be necessary, but easy enough to do.

We had heavy rains and I lifted up the crowl to see if my rigged-up fix actually worked and it worked much better than expected.


TerryB
Senior Member






Join Date: Jul 2008
Posts: 131






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Very common with all 00-06 Focus. It was a bad design right from the start. It's where the cabin air filter is placed. The only way to stop it is to devert the water away. The lip on the filter area is not high enough. Right now, mine will only leak with a torrential rain. Short of completely sealing the area, there isn't much else to do. The filter is in a terrible spot.