Re: Factory AC and glovebox.

Posted by HH56 On 2012/9/18 11:49:31

The Vintage Gen is a good approach and is a great unit. For a bare car with nothing or one whose heater is kaput, probably a good way to go. It is large though and would fill the passenger side. The radio would probably have to go for sure since I doubt it would be removable -- even not using the center for a vent and doing something like the factory top of dash vent setup instead. Get the cable operated or one made by Classic Air for cable operation and a lot of the existing controls could be reworked and repurposed. Classic will take existing levers and rework or custom make a control using them. That way you could also put a modern one piece radio in the top space. If I were not trying to maintain a sense of originality and already didn't have a car full of holes for this unit it would have been considered. I did download all the size and general info before deciding to redo the layout I had.

I bought, fabricated an air duct out of fiberglass to utilize the original blower hole, and almost went with reworked airflow for a smaller indash unit from Nostalgic Air. Ran into a clearance issue & I didn't want to permanently modify the car so decided at the last minute to gut it and put most of the components in the new factory looking box.

JW, the blower could be placed in front fairly easily but that brings up the recirc air issue. As PV8 has mentioned several times, hot and humid fresh air is not the best at cooling. For myself, I also don't like the location of the air inlets because they seem to catch all the exhaust from the car in front. Don't even like using the heater but suffer thru because I like cold less than exhaust.

Keith, that is a good idea on the box. I may give it a go if my current plan doesn't work out. On the old box, it was thinner cardboard so easier to flex. I had removed a couple of staples and replaced with binding decorative screws. Removing those allowed it to separate and flex to squeeze out. My repro is thicker material so hard to bend. What I plan is instead of stapling edges am going to use "U" channel on them with the outside edge fixed in place. That way the box can be inserted still slightly folded and then expanded and inner back edges pushed into the channels to hold together. Looks stock yet can be unfolded to remove -- at least that's the theory.