I am looking for a good air conditioning system with defrost for my 52 3100. I have seen several different A/C systems for my truck but I have no idea how each one performs. Any suggestions on a good a/c system would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Matt 8=]
If price is not a consideration there is only one--Vintage Air in San Antonio. Chisenhall and his crew probably do 99% of all the R&D on air conditioning applications. As soon as they develope a new one the competitors buy one and offer cheap knock offs a short time later. Probably run you about a grand but will work and look good. One thing you can do to make a system go from good to great is to insulate everywhere--above the headliner, behind the gas tank, inside the doors, under the seat, in the kick panels, under the floor mat, and on the inside of the firewall. We discard the jute matting and replace all with double foil sided blister insulation. There is also offered a thin flexible space age insulation that is pricey but said to work good. What is nice about the foil is you can use aluminum duct tape and the seams will be invisible. A side benefit of doing this is you can hear a mosquito in the cab pass gass while driving down some railroad tracks.
What Evan said ! it is also _critical_ to plug up all those holes in the cab no matter how small they might be . If you're keeping the 235 (good for you!) you'll need the damper assy from a '62 Chevy sedan as it'll have the double sheaves on it you'll need to run the AC compressor , IIRC " The Damper Dude " has them , else find a hot rodder who's butchering a bubble top (common sad to say) and buy the whole engine for the usual $150.00 and just take the damper , it is worth that alone . I often see junker or ' core ' 235's with this hard to find damper on them as many engines were swapped willy-nilly back in the day . -Nate
