I may have actually fixed my air conditioner in the Road Ranger.
- Didn’t work when I got it, but it was all there
- A couple of you guys walked me through how to check it, fix the seals and charge it up. Early success a couple years ago. Tolerable
- On a hot day on the road, just didn’t seem to be moving enough air, not cold enough, but better than nothing
- I checked behind the glove box and found a cardboard patch, held on with masking tape, that (somehow) had come loose! I repaired it with the aluminum duct tape a year ago. Better, but not what it should be.
Before the Truck Nationals trip, I went through the whole thing. Charge was actually a little high, but I left that alone. I tinkered with this and that and made sure I had no vacuum leaks. Riding around here it seemed cool enough. I also added a second soup can vacuum reservoir because the blend door would start to close when I was climbing a steep hill with the 1,350# trailer. That worked pretty well on the trip.
But in the hot sun, 95°, running down the road full speed, it just wasn’t putting out enough air, and it just didn’t seem to be as cold as it should be. But it got me home.
Let me also throw out there that I posted a year or two ago, that I actually gently took my leaf blower and blew backwards through the vents if something was stuck in there, and it actually put a lot more air out after that. But still not what you’d expect.
So Friday and Saturday I dug in further. Not only did I pull the patch off the duct behind the glove box, I expanded it. It was about 2.5 x 5“, and I made it about 10 inches long towards the blend door. I did that so I could get to the evaporator coil.
I took the blower out. If you’ve done it, you can only see the bottom left-hand corner of the evaporator coil from under the hood. And that’s the side the air blows against. The inside seemed pretty clean, but there was a little bit of dirt, and a little crud down near the bottom corner. I took the coil cleaner you use on a home or industrial air-conditioning unit, made up a funky spray nozzle so I could spray the whole thing from the inside and from the outside, and I let that sit while I ate lunch.
Then I took a paintbrush, cut off about half the length of the bristles, so it was like a long handled, mild scrub brush, I got in the cab upside down and backwards, and I worked it as best I could. I did the same thing under the hood, but you could only get to that lower left corner. However…
When I was trying to work the paintbrush, I couldn’t get the paintbrush to go up or to the right half of the coil. I could barely put my fingers in there, but I felt a little bit of something, and I was able to wiggle out a few strands of pine straw. Eureka!
Maybe I should post this under new tools, but I fabricated a pine straw and leaf removal tool from my wardrobe closet.
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Some of you might call it a bent up coat hanger. I doubled it so I had a double hook, and I worked it very gently nibbling away at the two bales of pine straw and leaves that were packed into that box. I always kept the points angled away from the coil so I wouldn’t scratch it open by accident. I couldn’t believe how much crap came out.
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The pictures don’t do it justice, that little pile is only about half of it. It was the size of an apple pie plate laying upside down, and twice as tall.
I have one of those big Black & Decker 8 gallon shop vacs with a 3 inch hose on it, the kind that will suck the sheet rock off the walls. I worked that from the outside, and my leaf blower from the inside, and went back-and-forth and back-and-forth, and I heard stuff rattling in the vacuum hose for another 15 minutes.
I sprayed it all with the coil cleaner again, and let it sit for a half hour or more. Than I sucked it out and blew it out again. Then I cleaned the coil cleaner off with some regular 409 type stuff, and then I sprayed brake cleaner through it.
When I sit in the driver seat, I put my seatbelt on, force of habit. Always did it since I first started to drive. Continued to do it after I got my drivers license a few years later. It paid off this time. When I turned on the air conditioner, so much air came out of the dashboard. It almost pushed me in the backseat!
I hooked up on my gauges and the pressure was still reading in the red zone, so I actually bled off the Freon until it was reading about 2/3 the way across the green zone. It was icy cold. I think it was
@sgtsandman at Ford Nationals who told me it could be overcharged, which doesn’t allow it to evaporate properly and you won’t get full cooling.
I haven’t taken it on a hard test drive, but it will get tested out tomorrow in the afternoon in the hot sun. I was getting high from all those chemicals, sitting in the driveway, blowing it out, I hope those are all dissipated by the time I hit the road.
Vacuum pump:
The replacement little vacuum pump came in also. When I was testing the vacuum, it seemed pretty good, but installing a little tiny electric vacuum pump for $10 seemed a good crutch for when I was climbing hills.
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The whole pump is about the size of a small prescription pill bottle. You have to solder on the two leads which is easy enough, but the little posts are very fragile and they’re actually part of the feather brush that goes to the rotor. Handling them the first time, I broke one off and there’s no way to fix it.
I was much more careful when I prepared them this time. I found a piece of rubber radiator hose about the right diameter of the nylon part of the pump, and cut it so it looked a little bit like a chair. I drilled a couple holes in the rubber up above where the wires were, so I could slip the pump in the rubber tube and route the wires in and out of those “ears” and zip tied them tight so they wouldn’t snap off. I slipped that into a block of high density foam that I drilled to accept it, and then I put a zip tie around that foam block to hold it onto one of the AC lines near the condenser coil for vibration insulation.
I didn’t want it running all the time, and I thought a lot about where to connect it. I ended up tapping into the two leads to the blower motor itself. The blower motor speed is controlled by resistors in the ground leg. By tying in there, the vacuum pump should work at different speeds to match the blower speed, but it will also go off when the heat and air is off. If that doesn’t work, I’m just going to ground it to the chassis, but still have the positive connected to the blower positive, which is full power on every level, again controlled by the ground resistors.
I attached it to where the low Freon switch is by the condenser coil and the dryer.
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Wish me luck!!
