When our project cars are rolling shells, we sometimes sit back and try to envision how the finished product will look and what features it might have. Most of us plan on at least a potent drivetrain and cool paint. The best in wheels and tires is also high on the list of dreams.
When it comes time to deck out our interior, most would agree that air conditioning would be perhaps the greatest luxury. Combined with a good stereo, air conditioning is going to make your car a pleasure to ride in every time. If you’ve ever been through a Florida or Arizona summer without air in your rig, then you know how nice it would be to have it. If your car wasn’t originally factory equipped with A/C, the task of air-conditioning your car seems even more intimidating. With no provision to mount a condenser, a dryer, or any other component, you know you’re going to have to start from scratch. However, when you stop and consider that air conditioning will dehumidify as well as cool, you know in your heart that you must go forward.
When the decision has been made to enhance your vintage Ford with air conditioning, Vintage Air of San Antonio, Texas, can help with any application you may have. Vintage Air is in the business of providing air conditioning for everything from ’32 Fords to musclecars of any stripe. Most rod projects have much closer confines, both underhood and inside, than a ’65 Mustang, so the kinds of cars we’re interested in are definitely possible. When we spoke to the folks at Vintage Air, we told them we were interested in an R134 system. We gave them a brief description of our project car: a ’64 Mercury Comet Cyclone.
This car is slightly larger than the Falcon platform underhood, but not by much. On top of that, the car is fuel-injected, so the underhood area is already quite crowded. The EFI setup also means that we have serpentine drive for our front accessories. We felt a car like this would offer a good challenge and yield a nice result. We gave Vintage Air such specs as radiator-opening size, engine size and year, and also our desired register layout for the interior. Vintage Air then tailored a system for our application.
Because there is perhaps no other car like this one in the world, we expect to do some improvisation in terms of hose length, mounting locations for some components, and for bracketry. We knew Vintage Air would support us in any way they could, but we did not have the expectation of a bolt-on affair. Let’s look at the components we got from Vintage Air, and then we’ll head out to Windsor-Fox and see what it took to get these goodies on the car.