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1974vw412 Samba Member
Joined: September 17, 2017 Posts: 41 Location: ATLANTA
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Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2017 5:56 pm Post subject: Underdash a/c unit for a 412 question |
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Has any one ever used one? Does it cool down the car?
Last edited by 1974vw412 on Tue Oct 24, 2017 7:05 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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hazetguy Samba Member
Joined: April 06, 2001 Posts: 10773 Location: iT StiNgeD iTseLf tO dEAd
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Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2017 6:38 pm Post subject: Re: WTB underdash a/c unit for a 73-74 VW 412 |
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Post a wanted ad in the classifieds, not the forums. _________________ thebucket: I invested in hoodride, now DBD won't return my call?
hazetguy: invested?
thebucket: Yeah Haze, its where people put money into a company in hopes of a return on their money |
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OB Bus Samba Member
Joined: February 09, 2003 Posts: 2541 Location: Ocean Beach in Beautiful BLUE California
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Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2017 7:16 pm Post subject: Re: Underdash a/c unit for a 412 question |
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And welcome to the forums!
H-Guy: OP was not trying to buy one, just asking if anyone had experience with one.
OP: I know it is kind of lonely in the 411/412 forums but this might be better posted there. _________________ Larry in OB
Stop dead photo links! Post your photos to The Samba Gallery!
69 Westfalia and 2002 Eurovan Camper. |
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1974vw412 Samba Member
Joined: September 17, 2017 Posts: 41 Location: ATLANTA
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Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2017 7:26 pm Post subject: Re: Underdash a/c unit for a 412 question |
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Great idea, thanks for the advise. |
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raygreenwood Samba Member
Joined: November 24, 2008 Posts: 21519 Location: Oklahoma City
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Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2017 9:17 pm Post subject: Re: Underdash a/c unit for a 412 question |
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OB Bus wrote: |
And welcome to the forums!
H-Guy: OP was not trying to buy one, just asking if anyone had experience with one.
OP: I know it is kind of lonely in the 411/412 forums but this might be better posted there. |
Not really. In the 411/412 forum....we check every post every day....and have more pictorials, how to's and data and parts fabricatio lists on a regular basis than most of the other forums.
If you dont have a 411 or 412.....you probabaly have no idea how much we that do....work on them. Drop by sometime!
Ray
Last edited by raygreenwood on Tue Oct 24, 2017 9:25 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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raygreenwood Samba Member
Joined: November 24, 2008 Posts: 21519 Location: Oklahoma City
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Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2017 9:23 pm Post subject: Re: Underdash a/c unit for a 412 question |
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Yes I have used one of these units...yea...in their stock form with the whole system they worked well.
That being said they used a massive, heavy compressor that robbed a ton of power.
If you rebuild the system get a Sanden style or newer compressor for less than half the power drain....get all new seals and hoses and use origibal R12 freon.
The design and area of the condensor does not work as well with R134....and even with modern o-rings the type of original couplings were not ideal with the smaller molecules of the R134.....but it does work.
If you use R134....you should get a new compressor no matter what.
You should drop by the 411/412 forum. No offense..... ....but those who do not own or drive them know virtually nothing about them.
We have lots of resources for suspension upgrades, engine, heater system, transmission, brakes etc. Drop by and introduce yourself. Ray |
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EverettB Administrator
Joined: April 11, 2000 Posts: 69820 Location: Phoenix Metro
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19super73 Hardcore Stock Nazi
Joined: October 18, 2007 Posts: 4351 Location: Cité Soleil
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raygreenwood Samba Member
Joined: November 24, 2008 Posts: 21519 Location: Oklahoma City
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Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2017 10:28 am Post subject: Re: Underdash a/c unit for a 412 question |
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The sad thing about AC in the 411/412...and holds true for "most" ACVW except I think the l;late bus...is that these were all dealer installed units...and the amount of pure hacking to the chassis to install the evaporator, screw in the components etc....was horrible. Ray |
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1974vw412 Samba Member
Joined: September 17, 2017 Posts: 41 Location: ATLANTA
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Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2017 8:03 pm Post subject: Re: Underdash a/c unit for a 412 question |
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Thanks for the information. I'll dig though the how to's. I just purchased a 74 412 wagon that needs some tlc. I have been looking at aftermarket under the dash ac units but the ones back from the seventies look much better. Living in Atlanta, you really need ac or just forget about driving during the warmer months; heavy traffic all around town. If you ever come across one, please drop a line.
Again, thanks for the information! |
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raygreenwood Samba Member
Joined: November 24, 2008 Posts: 21519 Location: Oklahoma City
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Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2017 9:04 pm Post subject: Re: Underdash a/c unit for a 412 question |
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1974vw412 wrote: |
Thanks for the information. I'll dig though the how to's. I just purchased a 74 412 wagon that needs some tlc. I have been looking at aftermarket under the dash ac units but the ones back from the seventies look much better. Living in Atlanta, you really need ac or just forget about driving during the warmer months; heavy traffic all around town. If you ever come across one, please drop a line.
Again, thanks for the information! |
....maybe I guess it depends on what you are used to. I lived in Atlanta from 1989 to 1995....my 412 and my 411s were my only cars. Never had AC. No big deal.
I drove all over the Southeast as my work region. I just never found Atlanta to be such a big deal heat and humidity wise. Lived in a no AC apt on Greenwood ave in the Virginia Highlands.
You get used to it! South Texas is far worse! Ray |
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1974vw412 Samba Member
Joined: September 17, 2017 Posts: 41 Location: ATLANTA
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Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2017 6:37 am Post subject: Re: Underdash a/c unit for a 412 question |
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Ray, you are a better person than me; lol. I am from PA and have not gotten used to the warm weather. |
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raygreenwood Samba Member
Joined: November 24, 2008 Posts: 21519 Location: Oklahoma City
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Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2017 7:36 am Post subject: Re: Underdash a/c unit for a 412 question |
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1974vw412 wrote: |
Ray, you are a better person than me; lol. I am from PA and have not gotten used to the warm weather. |
....and that answered my next qjestion! Where are you REALLY from! I lived in Philly for a year. I was workimg for a company in Philly most of the time I was in Atlanta.
Yep....it takes a little while to get used to it.....but to do so you have to make a concerted effort. Avoid AC when you can, dress for it...do not hide from the heat.....keep the house temps higher.....use fans.
I moved there from Oklahoma City....so I had a leg up on it.
I live in Iowa now. These people drop dead when it hits anything over 80°F
All of that said......did your car come with AC installed? If so you are much farther along than if it did not.
You will need that under dash condensor, the hoses, the drier......which you can siurce from a range of cars.....and the evaporater will be a difficulty.
The 411 and 412 used two different designs. One under the center section of tge front bunper....which had an,ABS housing and most got damaged by that location and are hard to find.
The other was a unique one....was inside the trunk.....in the spare tire well....where two slots were generally hacked into the spare tire well. The spare now sits on the outside on top of the cover for the spare tire. Being that its nkw higher than original spare tire....there were two blocks of shaped cut foam that went under the trunk mats on each side of the spare tire well to make thr trunk floor flat again.
The compressor.....will need to be either the original York or Tecumseh.....with mountkng bracket....and you will need the AC pulley that goes behind the fan......or hou can contact Gilmore down in Florida and see if they have a Bus engine kit that that mounts a more modern compressor in the same space.
There is a,relay you will need. The wiring for the compressor clutch....is already in most cars. Its a heavy black snd purple wire that runs from front to back and comes out on the left hand side of the engine compartment.
These are a start. Ray |
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TeamChili Samba Member
Joined: September 12, 2017 Posts: 29 Location: MN
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Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2017 4:33 am Post subject: Re: Underdash a/c unit for a 412 question |
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I may have some VW a/c parts coming up for sale soonish.
The a/c in my Bradley probably never worked, but I think all the bits are there.
At a minimum there’ll be a Type 4 compressor mount and pulley that’ll be of use to someone. |
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1974vw412 Samba Member
Joined: September 17, 2017 Posts: 41 Location: ATLANTA
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Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2017 5:36 pm Post subject: Re: Underdash a/c unit for a 412 question |
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Ray, I'm from the other side of PA, Pittsburgh. Thanks for the information on the ac. Imreally appreciate the insight. I'm looking forward to retrofitting the unit in, it should be fun.
Team chill, I am interested in purchasing the parts. Let me know when you are ready to get rid of them. Thanks |
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anglodeutsch4 Samba Member
Joined: September 02, 2003 Posts: 169 Location: Clear Lake, TX
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Posted: Fri Nov 03, 2017 7:29 pm Post subject: Re: Underdash a/c unit for a 412 question |
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Until the Nomad dropped a valve seat in 2010, I had functioning VW port-installed A/C like your picture on it. I converted it to use R-134a and POE oil. These systems were designed by a company VWoA ended up buying (in Dallas IIRC), and appear to have been installed at the port of entry. I have a sticker on the glove box door attesting to the VW facility at the Port of Houston having installed my Nomad's system.
1973 412 Variant with a (formerly 1.7L) 1.8L. I figured out a way to fit a Nippondenso 10PA15 tangent-mount compressor on the port-installed compressor mount bracket with hardware store stuff. The original York 2-cylinder compressor was not rebuildable...so, I had to go with something else. A Sanden 508 type will fit IIRC, but I had this former Toyota compressor, so I made it fit. I found even with the smallest compressor pulley I could get (4.5" OD), I could not spin the compressor fast enough at idle to keep up with the cooling load here in Houston. The port-installed "chin spoiler" evap is also a limiting factor, until you get up to ~25 MPH, not enough airflow to keep head pressures reasonable, so you have to slightly undercharge the system. Final problem, the 55A Bosch standard alternator could not keep up with the ~30A load from all the fans, plus the rest of the car's requirements at idle, so to get an A/C system to run well on a 412, I think there are three things to work on...
1. More alternator output at idle (newer style alternator with a smaller pulley)
2. Spin the compressor faster (maybe work out a poly-V belt drive at the aft end of the engine, similar to the alternator drive
3. More condenser surface area and airflow (condenser in the spare tire well, and another near the transaxle under the car, or Ray's suggestion of in the "valence" space up front).
You will DEFINITELY need to put together new barrier style hoses with Beadlock fittings to keep the refrigerant in. _________________ Lane
MGVWFAN (STF)
anglodeutsch4 (Samba)
73 VW 412 (the Nomad, dropped valve seat land now, argh!)
67 MGB (Built-In Rust from Abingdon)
2002 NB TDI (40 MPG)
2009 JSW 2.5 (love it, love it, love it!) |
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tlake Samba Member
Joined: March 25, 2018 Posts: 27 Location: WA
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Posted: Sun Mar 25, 2018 12:13 pm Post subject: Re: Underdash a/c unit for a 412 question |
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Anyone going to R134a should put in a modern parallel flow condenser. They deal with the extra heat generated by the greater pressure of R134a gas. Vintage Air make a great unit. As a side benefit such parallel flow condensers are wafer thin, allowing easier installation. |
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raygreenwood Samba Member
Joined: November 24, 2008 Posts: 21519 Location: Oklahoma City
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Posted: Sun Mar 25, 2018 12:16 pm Post subject: Re: Underdash a/c unit for a 412 question |
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tlake wrote: |
Anyone going to R134a should put in a modern parallel flow condenser. They deal with the extra heat generated by the greater pressure of R134a gas. Vintage Air make a great unit. As a side benefit such parallel flow condensers are wafer thin, allowing easier installation. |
Excellent to know!....and welcome to the 411/412 forums!
Ray |
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tlake Samba Member
Joined: March 25, 2018 Posts: 27 Location: WA
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Posted: Sun Mar 25, 2018 12:38 pm Post subject: Re: Underdash a/c unit for a 412 question |
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raygreenwood wrote: |
tlake wrote: |
Anyone going to R134a should put in a modern parallel flow condenser. They deal with the extra heat generated by the greater pressure of R134a gas. Vintage Air make a great unit. As a side benefit such parallel flow condensers are wafer thin, allowing easier installation. |
Excellent to know!....and welcome to the 411/412 forums!
Ray |
Thanks for the welcome Ray. What you said about having a head start if your car already has a/c is very true. Compared to starting from scratch, you can just swap the old compressor (mounting plate permitting), and condenser, cut new lines using the old as templates etc in the current locations. These comments apply to most imported cars of the '60s and '70s with a/c, which ran R12 using dealer installed kits, and where a good many cars didn't come with a/c, but these days many enthusiasts want to either add a/c or get their old systems working again. And they may not have worked for decades
The big difference versus other imports is the abovementioned hacking. This is because it's just so hard to work out where to put an a/c system on a rear engined air cooled car. Same trouble for the Porsches. And you have to run a/c lines longer and in convoluted fashion. Plus the a/c hardware gets exposed to the car's underside/road surface much more than a normal car. I can recall on the Corvair the condenser sat pancake style on top of the flat six. |
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anglodeutsch4 Samba Member
Joined: September 02, 2003 Posts: 169 Location: Clear Lake, TX
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Posted: Sun Mar 25, 2018 3:49 pm Post subject: Re: Underdash a/c unit for a 412 question |
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Ah, welcome to the Type 4 fun!
Yeah, about that parallel flow condenser thing...the "chin spoiler" condenser (at least, the one port-installed in my 1973) is a serpentine design. Big rectangular cross-section aluminum bars, with 6-7 tiny little parallel channels from one end of the tube to the other. One tube all folded over on itself, with hot gas going in one end, and less-hot liquid (hopefully) coming out the other. Lots of micro-stamped aluminum fins brazed to the square tube. With the very long and very short area available, I'm not sure if the 4-5 parallel tubes you'd be able to squeeze in with a parallel flow microchannel design would perform any better than the one serpentine microchannel tube. Academic exercise anyway, since it looks like no one makes a parallel flow microchannel condenser in the dimensions needed to replace the serpentine condenser in the "chin spoiler"...and I've looked over the last 10 years, quite a bit. Vintage Air makes lots of nice stuff for Buses and Beetles, but nothing really suitable for the Type 4, especially the Variant. The Buses can mount lots of condenser underbody and not have it get damaged, the Type 4 really can't due to being lower. The Beetles and T3's can mount condensers above the transaxle, but that's where the Eberspaecher is in the Type 4...and the 003 automatic is bigger than the Type 1/3 transaxle in any case.
The problem with the 412 Variant IMHO is getting enough surface area and airflow. The "chin spoiler" condenser uses two 4-blade 8 Amp fans to the left and right of the spare tire well below the front trunk, to pull air from the rear of the condenser and exhaust it underneath the car. Standing in traffic at idle, those two little fans barely produce enough airflow to remove the needed heat to keep R-134a condensed. I suspect the airflow and condenser were barely adequate in summer, in traffic, at rest with R-12, and R-134a just makes the problem worse. And, I'm not sure any current condenser design would do any better. It's a fundamental space limitation.
There are really no other places for extra condensing surface area, other than the spare tire well, a very small space in front of the rear axle carrier, and in the left and right engine air inlet plenums in the rear fenders. The sedans have space in the engine bay, but then you run into another problem...potentially heating the engine cooling intake air. The rear fender mounting areas in the Variant have the same problem. With the T4 engine, I would be very hesitant to do anything that raises the engine cooling air inlet temperature, especially in the summer...when the A/C's going to be working its hardest!
As for the 'Vair's condenser location...I have no idea if the 'Vair had cooling troubles, but the idea of dumping an extra ~25K BTUs into the engine cooling air inlet stream for an air cooled engine does not inspire confidence in cylinder head longevity Waterpumpers can tolerate the temperature increase, aircoolers, not so much. I know Porsche did it, too, and I would like to see some airflow and temperature figures, and some refrigerant P/T figures to see what the real effect on CHT and A/C system performance was from that installation.
I do know Griffiths has additional fenderwell condensers for the 911/930 to increase condensing area in their Kuehl setup. That's not a good option with the 412, especially the Variant, the Eberspacher and heater hoses take up a lot of the rear fenderwell area...the front fenderwell area appears to not have enough area to me to mount much more than a receiver/dryer. Now, the spare tire well holds some promise, cut a hole in the bottom and mount a small condenser there, with a fan on the bottom, and a metal plate divider above, and vents cut in the aft end. That might work.
BTW, I don't think the evaporator is an issue, it's a big copper tube type, and appears to be able to boil all the R134a you care to feed it. Just change the TXV out for one charged with R134a, and you're set. Now, interior airflow, that is another topic for another rant _________________ Lane
MGVWFAN (STF)
anglodeutsch4 (Samba)
73 VW 412 (the Nomad, dropped valve seat land now, argh!)
67 MGB (Built-In Rust from Abingdon)
2002 NB TDI (40 MPG)
2009 JSW 2.5 (love it, love it, love it!) |
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