One of the greatest inventions known to mankind is arguably air conditioning. Why do you think people in the Middle East are always fighting each other?! It's too dang hot, that's why! Spend an hour or so in bumper-to-bumper traffic in the dead of summer and you'll know how those people feel. But I digress. Maybe it's just regional politics. Anyways, that's an argument for another time and place. Right now, we're going to take a look at what makes installing a Vintage Air climate control system in your truck not only logical, but reasonably easy.
The system we'll be installing in the project F-1 is their Gen II Compac unit that features heating, cooling, and defrost capabilities in a compact package. As always, we're gonna add a CCT twist and make their kit fit our needs; after all, it wouldn't be Custom Classic Trucks if we did a straight install now would it?!
The first step is to locate where the evaporator (that's the black thing that goes up under the dash) is going to mount. We went with the Gen II Compac unit because it provides the most bang for your buck (re: cooling and heating capability) in a compact size. This will enable us to mount it nice and high behind the dash, keeping it out of sight for the most part. Since we're building the truck as a '50's-era custom, we want to play down some of the more contemporary items if we can, and this is one of those items. Plus, it leaves plenty of room for the passenger and keeps the inside of the firewall uncluttered. One of the drawbacks of mounting it as high as we did however, is that it ate up the space used by the glovebox, but that's one of the consolations we decided to make. We used a pair of floor jacks and some bits of an old hanger to hold the evaporator in place while the mounting brackets were fabricated. It was pretty straight forward and since every application will be slightly different, we'll skip that part. We will say that Vintage Air does provide a number of different brackets to get you started, which were very helpful.
Once the evaporator was in place, it was time to sort out the A/C vents. Once again, we didn't want the install to overbear the '50's vibe of the truck so we used Vintage Air's underdash vents mounted on a hide-away hinge that enables them to be tucked away, out of sight when not in use for the passenger and driver side vents. For the center outlet, we reconfigured the stock Ford heater box to direct the air up the center of the cab and out either side, controlled by the mechanical doors on the box. This enabled us to maintain the aesthetic while maximizing the A/C unit's efficiency of cooling and heating the cab evenly. One thing we did leave out are the defrost vents at the top of the dash. The Pontiac dash angles away from the rather vertical windshield at over 90-degrees which would make angling the vents towards the windshield fairly difficult. At this point, we opted to exclude the vents but we'll probably come back and install something at a later date.
Since we're still in the fabrication phase of the F-1 build, some of the install steps have been left out. While there are a few technical aspects we don't cover, like installing and crimping the hose ends (using a 134A crimping tool) and lubricating the O-rings, and installing the heater hoses, these are things that will be done once the truck is painted and in final assembly. At this point, the initial install is complete with all the major components in place, the important hoses cut and marked to be crimped, and what little fabrication that needs to be done, is completed.
