Ticking boxes today..Moving forward slowly.
First job was to get the AC running, (38 degrees today..disgusting weather) The previous compressor had no suck..for want of a better term..Clamping off the suction hose whilst in operation, it couldn't achieve a vacuum, so good old Ebay came up with a chinese copy of a Sanden compressor from America. It looked the goods...had the right number of grooves on the pulley, but one pair of its mounting legs weren't there..still, I figured I could rotate the whole thing & make it work, & the price was right..$300 AU landed.. (150ish your money). Interestingly, the build date on the comprerssor was march 2002, so it was not fast moving stock!
As it turned out, it wasn't quite the same but I made it work. The compressor clutch, whilst having the same number of grooves in the pulley, had the wrong offset, so it didn't line up with the other pulleys. I was able to swap my old compressor clutch over, complete & that sorted that. Those two missing mounting legs that I talked about, were a pain & I did have to rotate the compressor to utilise the other mounting legs to get it to bolt up, the Suction hose (the big one) was now closer to the firewall (bulkhead) but there was plenty of give in the hose to make it fit. rotating the compressor mountings made the electric clutch wires too short, so I had to fix that, and I changed the connector on the ends as they were brittle & partly broken.
Sucked it down, held vacuum over night, so I gassed it up & it's working lovely. I had previously replaced all the hoses (I have the facility to make my own), the receiver dryer & flushed all the rest of it out. The interior blower was hit & miss, sometimes working, sometimes not, but traced that down to a terminal in a big multi pin plug near the blower motor, that had pushed out the back of the connector & was only just touching..I wonder how long it had been like that!
Lovely to have AC on days like today!
The Chinese compressor, via USA
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The missing mounting legs
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