Well, thanks to some great weather, I finished up the conversion today. Still need to fiddle with a couple trim items and some nagging little "bugs", but this project gets a big *DONE* stamp. The last "oops, that doesn't fit" was the glovebox. I had to cut about 3 inches from the glovebox so it would fit. The back of the insert was hitting the heater/AC box. No way around it. Some folks asked for pics showing the modifications that I had to do, and the final result. Here you go:

Interior shots. Still need to clean up, install the kick panel vent covers, and rig up the vacuum to the outside air vent:







Compressor shots, showing the little bracket extender I had to fabricate:







Firewall with hoses and wires:



bill.

 

Hi wrwalke, Congratulations on finishing a big project, pat yourself on the back and brake out a cold one!
I was wondering why you chose that conversion over some other brand or repairing the stock system.PG

 

is that a Briklin Gt in the back ground?

Oh yeah great job. great post.

 

Yeppers, that is a Bricklin SV-1, VIN #1963 in original lily pad baby puke green. Welcome to my winter project (I've been saying that for 3 yrs now).

bill.

 

Hats off to ya bill, looks like you did a real clean job.
Three years on the Bricklin, eh? You should be just about done with it.

 

Hey there pg. I chose the HRA kit for a couple reasons. First I priced out buying all the replacement parts to put the original back together, and then convert it from R12 to R134a, and it was a bit daunting. At the end of all that work and expense, you still have 25+ year old technology and a kludge conversion to a coolant that the compressor and valves might not like.

I decided to check out the 3rd party options, and if HRA is good enough for Boyd Coddington in a $200k custom hotrod, it is quality enough for me. Total cost with wiring, controls, hoses, brackets and all the pieces and parts was $1200 or so. Nice quality stuff, and if I was doing a pre-78 without factory air, it probably would have been bolt-on plug and play. As it was, I'm happy to get all that space in the engine compartment back (check that last picture and notice that the driveway is visible now), and only had 3-4 hours total in fabricating parts and pieces, and bending/coercing parts to fit. I had to make a piece of the compressor bracket, shallow my glovebox by a few inches, and play a bit with the vacuum setup... not too bad.

Total job time was about 8 hours on the car, including some other little wiring, lighting, and trim work. Somehow a couple little "bugs" crept in, like a suddenly dead headlight switch, a dead courtesy lamp, and gage cluster lights that mysteriously stopped working. Probably 4 hours work if you did it on the right car, with the right parts, and didn't break stuff while doing the job.

Oh, final bug... the control switches for fan speed and heat/AC/vent/defrost are backwards. Came that way from HRA, and it is probably easier to fix the labels than to fix the switch. Damn details.

bill.