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Thread: Air Conditioning the Cab
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mazdab8r
Newbie
Australia
Posts: 9
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posted February 23, 2004 05:04 AM |
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Air Conditioning the Cab
As the globe is getting potentially hotter and hotter each year, and coz the summer here is so @#$*ing HOT! I've decided on embarking on a new project.. to air condition my truck.
I'm just curious to know if anyone else has installed an air conditioner where there hasn't previously been one (in your REPU's of course, or in my case B1600) I had a 2L engine from an '82 B2000 given to me sitting in my shed with a compressor on it. What other parts will I need to acquire, and what would be expected prices? I'm guessing I could get most parts from the wreckers which would decrease price a bit.. any thoughts???
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brad
Rotorhead
Posts: 1672
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posted February 23, 2004 10:39 AM |
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An A/C system consists of:
Compressor
Evaporator (i think this is what they call the "radiator" of the A/C system)
Dryer (keeps moisture out of system. Mounts next to Evaportor)
Two high pressure hoses
An exchanger. (This is like a heater core but it gets cold then you blow air over it and into the cabin.)
Switch
Temperature adjuster
Blower ( use the stock one for heater)
Vents to blow the cold air thru into the cabin.
A way to increase idle rpms when the compressor kicks in so that the engine doesn't stall @ idle. The compressor takes quite a big of torque to turn.
Refrigerant like R134a or Freon if you can find it.
A UV dye so when it leaks refrigerant you can find where it's coming from with a UV light.
A good fan to suck pleanty of air through the radiator and evaporator. I like the Black Magic 150 @ summitracing.com
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-brad-
74 REPU Lawn Green
81 Rx-7 racecar. 12a J-
Bridge
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kansei
Redlining
Wankelized
Posts: 423
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posted March 01, 2004 09:13 AM |
 Edited By: kansei on 1 Mar 2004 09:20 |
Try dealer kit or RX-7 components...
You could try searching dealers for complete A/C kits sitting on the shelves. For instance, I found a complete kit for an 89 B2600i still sitting on a dealer shelf in Alabama for under $800. Of course, you will need to hope that the bracket on your donor engine will hold the new compressor in the kit you get, or use the old compressor, providing it still works. I realize complete dealer kits will be hard to come by or extinct for the B1600 or even B1800, but I know you can find them for the B2000+ trucks. For the trucks that had the A/C and heat run off the same blower motor, you could adapt your truck to do the same- it may require using a heater core out of the truck you buy the A/C kit for, but it can be done easily enough.
A cheaper option is to use as many A/C components as you can off of an RX-7. If I restore my '76, for instance, I will probably be converting the entire HVAC system over to that off of a '79-83 RX-7 (the '84 & '85 cars had a slightly more complex electronically controlled system with variable resistors, and touch control electronics, predecessing the logicons of '86), including the whole A/C system, blower, heater core, dash vents and the slide rule controls off the 7. That way, you also gain the ability to select, ventilation locations (albeit you will have to fabricate the dash vents). Being as you can get those early RX-7s for a few hundred dollars for a complete car any day of the week (at least here in Michigan you can), it will be alot cheaper to use those components than try to buy a bunch of new stuff. Keep an eye out for the Sanden dealer installed compressors that were used on non-power steering cars (S & GS models), as they tend to be the ones that seize up before the Denso and the third Mazda OE manufacturer (name escapes me right now). You will have other fabrication issues such as mounting the condenser up front, and the hard lines will probably not work exactly how you want them to, but they are fairly straight forward to create your own. Some of the dealer installed kits (not the port installed ones, though) had flexible hoses through the entire system, negating any hard lines. The only problem with those systems is that almost all of them came with the Sanden compressors. That may be your best bet for the hoses/lines, however. Almost all 1979 and 1980 RX-7 models that had dealer installed systems had the hoses with no hard lines.
Hope that helps a little. Let me know if you need more help.
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Neal A.E. Swigert
Greenville, Michigan
1974 REPU Resto Project
1976 808 Wagon
1977 Cosmo
1978 Savanna RX-7 GT
1980 Leather Sport RX-7
1980 Petty Targa RX-7 #11
1985 GSL-SE RX-7
1988 RX-7 10th Ann
1993 RX-7 VR Touring
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