Classic Auto Air AC- things to look for

I recently installed a Classic Auto Air AC/Heat unit and thought I'd address 5 issues I had with it with the hopes it saves someone some headaches.

Overall I was impressed with the kit. Installation was pretty easy. I did fabricate my own compressor bracket, using the same belt tensioner pulley CAA provides (I sourced mine elsewhere). I saved about $400 making my bracket. Would I recommend the CAA unit? Yes I would. The only negatives I have after the installation is that the evaporator box is rather large and is visible under the glove box and the plastic glove box they provide does not fit. Here is the 5 items I encountered, in no particular order.

1. Glove box does not fit very well. I had read other people comment on this from a few years ago and thought that surely they had to have fixed it. Nope! The fix was simple yet on the ugly side. I had a newer OER cardboard box to work with so I simply cut out a section and slipped the rear into the front and glued it with thick CA glue using CA kicker as I went. Yeah, its ugly but with papers in there I don't even notice it. Nobody puts their eyeballs where the camera is.

2. The idler pulley tensioner. To be perfectly fair, I sourced this for my homemade bracket/tensioner myself but I'm about 99% sure this is the exact same part they sell in their kit. The issue I had was the flat boss which bolts up against the bracket was not parallel to the boss the pulley is attached to. This was evident as you rotated the tensioner. If you purchase their bracket, look for that and I'm sure they will make it right for you. In my case, I took it to a local machine shop and had them milled parallel.

3. The newer units now come with potentiometers that are installed on the control lever unit. Apparently, mine and another customer got ones where the mode pot. was installed backwards. What this did was cause the dampers to be reversed for the floor and dash outlets. The fix is simple, you remove a couple small screws on the mode pot and flip it 180*. The picture below was taken prior to me flipping the mode and you will notice the terminals 1 and 2 are on opposite sides of each other on the 2 pots.


4. The evaporator unit is huge. Unless they took my feedback I provided and included a bracket, you will want to modify it and since the glove box still hasn't been made right I wouldn't hold my breath. The instructions have you remove the cowl fan, hold the unit level and install 2 bolts into brackets, using a couple of the original fan mount holes in the cowl. These bolts are pretty close and when you are done the evaporator is NOT rigid at all. My fix was to make a small bracket which I attached to the evaporator (see picture with sharpee drawing) and screw this to the under dash sheet metal. BE VERY CAREFUL IF YOU DO THIS AS YOU ARE DRILLING INTO THE HOUSING FOR THE COILS! I used a collar on my drill bit and only drilled through the plastic. Then I used a dental pick and probed for the coil units and selected the appropriate fastener. When I told the guy at CAA about this I think he was surprised there wasn't a bracket and I got the feeling they will be adding one to the newer kits but be aware of this.

While I'm on the evaporator I should mention that when you order the kit, you need to specify if your car was built as an AC/Heat or Heat Only. So...my car was built as an AC/Heat but someone replaced the controls and installed a heat only unit under the dash. So I ordered it as a heat-only. Well, apparently AC cars have a larger fan opening in the cowl which I discovered when I removed the old unit. As a result, the 2 bolt holes for the installation of the evaporator unit did not work and I had to address that. Also, the plastic disc that covers this hole and which you drill 4 holes for the AC and heater lines was not large enough so I had to machine my own. This was my fault...I thought the control levers was the only difference.

5. Where to install the control module?? So like I mentioned before, the evaporator box is large, resulting in a shorter glove box, but it also hangs down and shows. I myself don't care about that but when it came time to install the control module, the length of some of the wires were too short to provide much of an option. The only place I could find was on the face of the evaporator, under the dash. Perhaps you will find something better. I tried to use self adhesive velcro but it failed so once again I used my drill with a collar attached so I could only drill 1/8" deep and then I probed for any coil unit where the fasteners would go before I attached it. If I were to do it over again, I would probably lengthen the wires but I got lazy and it is something I can always do in the future.

I have tried several times to delete the last picture of the pulley tensioner and it just won't go away. You will notice the washer between it and the bracket. That is actually a shim I had to add to make up for the material lost when the machine shop made the surfaces parallel. Yeah, it was off that much.