When I went to mount the receiver I found that the top, passenger side condenser mount was interfering.
I ended up having to remove the condenser, cut the mount and reshape it to give the receiver room to mount where it is supposed to. It was a time consuming process to get the measurements correct.
When I went to install the brackets for the last time the rubber insulators finally fell apart. I searched and searched everywhere to find something rubber that could replace the original mounts. After a long search I found the small, rubber discs that mount toilets to the floor as a suitable replacement. I had to buy three packages of them and five of them on top of one another to get the proper distance and firmness.
Then it was time to make all the hoses fit. The new system was a hodgepodge of old, standard size fittings and newer, -AN style fittings. I numbered each hose and labeled each end of that hose and drew up a detailed description, with pictures, so that the hose shop would have no issues when making the new hoses. It took over an hour just to write the diagram and in the end he ended up looking at it and, without even reading it, telling me it would be better if I just made sure I was there when he made them. That caused me to have to take a few days of my lunch break at the hose-making place. There were, of course, complications with parts not being ordered and problems of the sort which made my deadline for making Pigeon Forge very difficult. I ended up working until late at night and going in to the hose-making store early before work.
Along with the new POA valve which I had rebuilt and recalibrated for 134a, I mounted the new compressor so I could get all the measurements and mock up I needed. Because I eliminated the muffler from the original compressor I had to get adapters for the rear of this compressor and make sure the new hoses matched those fittings. After I had all the hoses made I realized that the original muffler had the high-side service port for the air conditioner system and when I removed it I had also removed the service port. I had no where to attach the high-side hose to charge the air system. After almost an entire night of research I found where I needed to install the service port and happened to remember that the hose-shop had one laying on the shelf. It worked out perfectly and happened to be exactly what I needed.
Despite my best efforts, we weren't able to make it to Pigeon Forge in The Clam. We were supposed to leave on Thursday after I got off work and I had scheduled the car to have the air system charged at work. While attempting to charge the system we discovered that the air conditioner was causing The Clam to overheat. I couldn't risk overheating and breaking down on the side of the road in 100 degree heat with humidity with April and a baby who isn't used to those type temperatures. After spending a lot of time experimenting with varying amounts of refrigerant I finally threw in the towel and we drove my parents' very non-exciting Chevrolet HHR to Pigeon Forge. Good for gas mileage, bad for memorable vacations, however I must say that having a working air conditioner was worth it because that weekend was very, very hot and humid. Even though we didn't have The Clam, dad did haul the cycles up in his trailer and we managed to get in a good ride.
Along in all of this fun my mower quit cutting so I had to learn how to diagnose a faulty PTO
Since I literally left for Pigeon Forge immediately after finding out there was an overheating issue I had to wait until after the vacation to find the problem. The first thing I found was that the fan clutch was not working at full capacity so I replaced it with a new one. This helped, but at idle the car would still overheat and the air temperatures out of the vents was very warm. I have determined it will be necessary to install an electric, pusher style fan in front of the condenser to cool it at idle. This is only necessary on the hottest, most humid days when idling, but I still can't have the car overheating and leaving April and Rose stranded. My plan is to research what type of electric fans work best and have the best quality and go from there. I'll have to wire it up to come on whenever the compressor is on, which will work fine for this application because the compressor doesn't cycle.
April test drove the wagon on a trip to a nearby town to test out the air conditioning and the notorious blower motor quit working again. When she called and told me I knew what to expect, another melted in-line fuse. Sure enough, that's what the problem was. I knew it wasn't the fan motor this time because I had just replaced it so I removed the wire that powers the blower motor entirely from the harness. It's a 10 gauge wire that runs directly from the alternator back to a couple relays. Each blower setting has a separate resistor coil it runs through except for the highest setting, which has it's own relay and proves full voltage to the motor.
In the wiring I found this abomination. Among several other splices there was this one that someone had simply twisted back together and put black tape over.
I used a voltmeter to check the voltage and ohms of the entire blower motor system. I'm fairly certain that this section of the harness was the main problem. If not, it certainly needed addressing. I made a new section of harness with new 10 gauge wire. I had to special order the in-line fuse with 10 gauge wire. The biggest I could buy locally had 12 gauge wire. Because this wire will carry the full 12 volts of the battery I soldered all the connections together rather than crimping them and used heat shrink tubing to protect everything.
I removed the original fitting from the harness clip and soldered it onto the end of the new wire so it fits back into the clip as it originally did. If this fixes the problem I can move on to the next projects. The carburetor has a pretty bad hesitation and stumble which I need to get addressed so that I can show the transmission shop how the torque converter is shudder when it shifts out of overdrive. Then I need to find why I still have a driveline vibration. The engine also seems to have a vibration that I want to have an expect look at. Right now I suspect either a bad harmonic balancer or a bad engine/transmission mount. Then I can move on to the small exhaust leak on the driver's side exhaust manifold. I changed the gasket but it didn't fix the problem so I'm probably going to have to remove the manifold and have it milled flat. Then, after all that, I can return to trying to get the rear window to seal properly. For now we have two buckets in the rear that catch all of the water that makes its way in, which at this point has been limited to a small amount.
