What a week(s)!

  We have liftoff! I had two major items to do on the 240sx and this past Friday I was able to complete the second one. As you know, living in southern California as well as any other states during summer time (specially with global warming ) it can get extremely hot! Definitely into the triple digits, so I knew when getting this car that AC was a must. The past two weeks, my dad and I spent many hours in the evening usually from 7-11pm or later installing the system. 

Here's a quick synopsis as to what was done but first a picture of the car!

First, I researched to see what AC setup could be adapted to the RB25 engine that's easily accessible in the US. I found out through Zilvia.net  and nicoclub.com that the 1993-98 Infinti J30 was an (almost) perfect plug and play system and I say almost because there are a few items I had to get modified in order to get everything installed properly. We luckily found a couple of pretty good condition J30s at our semi local junk yard. So we took a trip to the junk yard and grabbed the whole system from a 97 J30. This included: both low and high lines (3 total), condenser, compressor, and fan as well as all the connectors, brackets and hardware that were attached to the system. 

Once we had these, we quickly realized that the low line outlet was slightly larger in diameter then that of the J30, luckily when the previous owner removed the original AC system, they left a portion of the female low line from the 240 attached. At this point there were two options to solve for this, go back to the junk yard and cut enough of the evaporator to be able to weld this to the 240sx female end that was left over or get an adapter that can connect to the J30 line and the 240 evaporator. I took a quick trip to my local AC shop and asked if they had said adapter. Turns out they do have adapters just not metric ones, which was the case. So on to option two, go to the junk yard and finish taking the line from the J30. Off we went the following Friday, while there, I also grabbed the high side line from the evaporator in case it was needed, and a couple of the rear bumper lights. 

Now, armed with both sides of the lines, I got them welded as an adapter and began the install process. We went ahead and over-laid the lines to see if anything would be difficult. I was able to install the adapter to the low side of the evaporator with a new o-ring, which was a pain to tighten because there was no way of getting a wrench in there from the top (ABS block was in the way) or from the bottom (too close to firewall and not enough clearance). We had to move the ABS block over in order to get a wrench in there to tighten it. We went ahead and installed the compressor and belt which was pretty easy. We tried to install the low line but realized it was going to have to get modified on the compressor side since it was kinked towards the intake. We skipped doing this, and installed the high pressure line, first on the evaporator side then carefully bending it around the back of the engine towards the condenser, this concluded night one. 

The following day, I decided to go to the local AC shop and ask if they can just make a custom line made of just a rubber hose with the J30 low line and they said they did! We knew this was going to be bottleneck so I went ahead and had the line made. Night two, we started removing the intercooler, radiator, and hoses to install the condenser. Turns out, the condenser fits nicely in between the frame and radiator (we took the opportunity to make a bracket to secure the radiator to the chassis and the condenser to the subframe, it was previously just resting on it and held by zip ties lol). Once this was setup, we realized that the clutch fan was not going to fit so we needed to order some e-fans (unfortunately, this isn't enough to cool both the engine and condenser but more on that later). I ordered two 10" fans (should of ordered 12") and installed them in front of the condenser (plan is to move them inside the engine bay and place one 14" fan on the outside (3 total...?). Next we went ahead and installed low line to the compressor, high line to condenser, the last line between the compressor and condenser, end of night two. 

Night three was all about wiring, we found the original 240sx wiring diagram and used that to figure out how to power the E-fans, we ended up grabbing the radiator fuse wires and routing them directly to kick the fans on when we power the car. We also found the original wire connector that ran to the AC compressor and figured out how to wire it to control it from inside the cabin using the original AC buttons. On the final night, we re-installed the intercooler, topped off coolant and verified everything was connected. I also found out there were a few missing bolts from the headers to the exhaust and in between the engine and transmission which I installed (hopefully I don't smell too much exhaust fumes now lol). This now brings us to this past Friday, I took the car back to the AC shop to charge it with gas and verify there were no leaks in the system. After a few hours of waiting and talking to owners, I got the car charged and was blowing ice cold AC all the way home! 

So there you have it, finally after two months of owning the car, I completed the two "urgent" projects I wanted to do. It has both power steering and air conditioning finally. The other projects that I'm working towards are replacing the front seats (already have some lined up), tune the car to run properly with the turbo it has, fix the front suspension, paint it, and throw on some deep dish wheels. The rest of these projects will probably happen in the next year or so. Check out an image of the car without the front bumper below.

P.S. We had two windows installed on our home as well this past Wednesday!

Till next time!

Peace