Thanks for all the suggestions from the list on the AC fix for my 86 Chevy
pickup.
Before getting pretty radical with it, I opted to try one more can of R134 with
leak
sealant before doing anything else. While the compressor still cycles more
than I might
like, the AC now works well enough and I'll probably see how long that gets me.
The truck has 224K miles on it and the AC hardware has never been touched in
its entire
life. With that many miles on it, while the body is very good, the mechanicals
are
quite worn, and it is near the end of its useful life unless I do a major
restoration.
So I didn't want to put any more money into it than necessary; a complete
rework of the
AC would cost about 1/2 of what the truck is worth.
To answer one question, I did not pump the system down before putting in the
R134
conversion kit. The way I read that is that that pretty well has to be done
(legal
issues) by a professional collection system...even though in my case the
pressure was
zero so any R12 was pretty well gone. The conversion kit said that it was
designed to
work with small residual amounts of R12, so I just went with what I had, and it
appears
to have worked.
Thanks for all the input,
Mark Noakes
oletrucks is devoted to Chevy and GM trucks built between 1941 and 1959
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