Under dash air conditioning kits

[D-MAN]

Hi are there any underdash air conditioning kits for FB/EK's ?
One of the conditions (or should I say demands) of the wife is that if I buy a car it needs to be fitted with air con.
As they say happy wife happy life.... So I know there are heaps if kits for all the old Yank Tanks but I can't seem to find anything for an old holden.
If anyone has fitted it to a grey in particular I would appreciate any advice!

[NoMAD]

Everything's custom man... Depends how much you won't showing, how you want the vents, do you require a glovebox etc...

The grey will require custom brackets and you would want to use a new sanden style unit to not zap much power... There's a bit of work involved (or dollars / both) depending how you want to go about it... Most people happily live with the quarter windows and the vent

Cheers
Nathan

[WayneXG95]

Didn't someone on here show us a small "Hot Rod" type?

[Blacky]

There are plenty of universal type ones available from places like vintage air - but you need to do all the fitting , fabricating etc yourself - theres no kit for an early Holden. I seem to recall something about a '99 - 2000 Magna condenser being a really good fit so thats one piece of the puzzle . Measure up the available room under your dash then Google hot rod airconditioner , you should find plenty of stuff to look at.

And once you have sorted it all out ,please let the rest of us know ????????

[WayneXG95]

As Blacky said..

[Devilrod]

I think it was Malcolm on here that fitted a vintage air one in his EK. Do a search under users and you should find some build shots.

But as the others have said you'll need to fabricate nearly everything to make it fit. In all honestly the vent windows do a great job and a cheap fan that plugs into the cigarette lighter will help once stopped.

[D-MAN]

Thanks for all the replies!

[BIGREVNEV]

i,ve decided to jump on the band wagon with this aswell , i think a compact a /c unit shouldnt be to big a challenge

[D-MAN]

i,ve decided to jump on the band wagon with this aswell , i think a compact a /c unit shouldnt be to big a challenge

After having a look I think it would be a bit too much for my limited skills
Looks like the missus will have to make due with the old fashioned window!

[BIGREVNEV]

the biggest hurdle that i see is going to be how to run a twin pulley from the grey motor harmonic ballancer, . i think running a single belt will be problematic , has any one ever seen a duel v ballancer on a grey before ?

[Blacky]

I suppose you could machine one up ???

[Harv]

the biggest hurdle that i see is going to be how to run a twin pulley from the grey motor harmonic ballancer, . i think running a single belt will be problematic , has any one ever seen a duel v ballancer on a grey before ?

I would only run a single pulley on the A/C, same as GMH largely does. The 11A automotive belts handle the load fairly well, and worst comes to worst you can up the ante to a 13A belt.

The easiest way is to replace the factory grey harmonic balancer with the PowerBond aftermarket one. These are Rare Spares part number 7401305 for the wide-belt FX/FJ (PowerBond part number HB17B-N) and 7408676 for the narrow-belt FE-EJ style (HB1049-N). Each of these aftermarket harmonic balancers has three concentric bolt holes. The holes are tapped through the hub to 3/8-24UNF on a 2 13/16” (71.44mm) PCD. Whilst the holes are ostensibly there to mount a modern harmonic balancer puller tool, they also make a very neat mounting point to bolt up a flat pulley. The single groove bolt-up pulleys from Holden red motors and Commodore Starfire 4-cylinder engines have this PCD, and are a neat bolt-on fit.

However, a word of caution... if you are thinking that this would be a cool way to mount the double groove pulleys from a red motor, then don't. The GMH red motor/Starfire twin-groove pulleys are not appropriate for the task. The GMH twin-groove pulleys are two different groove sizes. For example, one groove is 5.25” diameter, the other 5.10” (or as another example 5.23” and 5.09”). Whilst this doesn’t sound like much (and is hard to see by eye unless you are looking for it), the difference in groove diameter means that connecting two different drive pulley groove diameters to the driven pulley (same groove diameter) puts the pulleys into bad conflict. One belt would slip badly. For example, on the 5.25”/5.10” pulley, at idle the belt would slip 8” every second, and at full noise 80”. Way too much. This is why GMH only ever drove two different accessories (e.g. airconditioning and power steering) and never ran them as a twin belt.

If your heart is set on a twin-groove, one option is to use a twin-groove pulley from a Chev, drilled to the PowerBond balancer 2 13/16” (71.44mm) PCD. This is what I did for Gary's Type 65 Norman supercharger (see the bottom of page 7: http://www.fbekholden.com/forum/viewtop ... 0&start=90). The Chev pulley are readily available in aluminum (a Speedmaster PCE239.1008 item is not a bad choice (http://store.speedmaster79.com/)). The downside to using Chev pulleys though is that the internal bore is much larger than the grey motor crankshaft (the Chev is 11/8” versus the 1” grey motor crank). This means it can be quite hard to centralise the Chev pulley onto the grey motor crank. I tried using one of the harmonic balancers as a template, and even taking quite some care could not get the three holes drilled perfectly concentrically. If using the Chev pulley it is recommended to either get a hub centric ring made up (a washer 1” ID and 11/8” OD), or to have the three mounting holes professionally drilled by a machine shop (3/8-24UNF on a 213/16” (71.44mm) PCD). Note when buying a Chev pulley that you will typically want one that lies very close to the harmonic balancer (rather than the “long water pump” type that stick out further). One good reason to run only a single-grove pulley is that you will rapdily run out of real estate... there is only 1" clearance between the fan and radiator in a standard FB/EK Holden. By the time you move the fan around to avoid belt clash, you may need to move the standard radiator forward to suit or run an aftermarket electric fan.

Cheers,
Harv

[Blacky]

You could run one of those pulleys Harv , and run one belt to the water pump and alt/gen as per stock and use the other for the aircon compressor ???

[BIGREVNEV]

Thats worth a gold star harv , I see another issue running a twin groove balancer could be clearing the fan blades ,

[D-MAN]

There is a fb with a grey motor for sale on gumtree at the moment and it says it is running airconditioning would be interested to see how he did it...