I'm looking to do an aftermarket A/c unit for my 65 ford pickup, I have seen a few different companies from oldairproducts, nostalgicairparts, and classicautoair. old air products has a nice setup for my truck its the hurricane 1000, and it does both heat and A/C from one unit, the total price including a compressor and louvers is $1060. If anyone has any reviews or recommendations on this company or another im open to any advice, thank you.

 

I just finished installing the Classic Auto Air "Perfect Fit" (Ha!) unit in my '66 LWB CC 2WD 352 4 speed F100. Now that I'm done with the install, I think I will be happy with it. Like the one you quoted, it has heat and A/C all in one unit for dehumidified defrosting, etc. I haven't done a real thorough comparison with other brands, but the interior components seemed pretty similar in appearance, and didn't impress me. Under the hood I do notice a difference between the CAA and VAA routing of compressor hoses and where they pass through the firewall, so obviously the evaporator units must be somewhat different. Since I also added power steering to my truck at the same time, I needed a crank pulley that would handle both P/S and A/C, in addition to water pump. Finding one was difficult, but handled through forum member Bill W (not ND, the other one!). I paid extra for a 7 bladed fan and a billet slider heat/ac control panel, and got a fan shroud from LMC Truck. The underhood install was pretty straight forward, and relatively easy, helped by the fact that I had the whole front end disassembled for restomod. Mounting the evaporator inside was trying. We first did it as a trial fit and several things needed tweaking to make it work. Maybe it was my 46 year old truck that was tweaked! It didn't help that I purposely changed out the supplied interior vents for something different. Be prepared to give up most of your glove box space. If you want to go into greater depth, send me a PM with your phone number and a time to call and I will be glad to discuss it with you. Good luck with your project!

 

That's on my list too. I've heard that the ClassicAutoAir is a good system and is the best to install. Of course it's more that the Hurricane.

 

Do you have any pics of the interior of the cab with the installed units??? I am also looking at putting one in mine.
Thanks
Mike

 

Check the Classic Auto Air website, and I'd imagine the other companies' websites, for what the standard installation is supposed to look like. In the case of the CAA installation, there are two chrome (plastic) eyeball vents mounted at each end of the dash, underneath it, in little black plastic box mounts. Then there are also two rectangular plastic center vents and a three push/pull cable control set which vaguely resembles the stock heater controls. I'm afraid I didn't like any of this so I bought their upgrade billet slide controls, moved the eyeball vents up into the dash by drilling holes where the former right vent **** (pre '65 trucks) and windshield washer button were, and used a modified '66 Lincoln dash bezel for the center vents and a place to mount the slide control. I'm sorry I haven't got pictures loaded onto the computer yet so hope you can imagine it. Hope athis helps.

 

Sounds like a cleaner way to do the vents!!!

 

So.. once installed does the ClassicAutoAir actually heat and cool ok?

 

There are a lot of "mechanical joints", AKA fittings with o-rings, in the system with great potential for leakage of R-134a. Once we installed the hardware, I took my truck to an A/C shop for servicing and they tracked down leaks and got the system going. It worked great for a couple of days and then failed to cool. I have no doubt there's another leak to track down, possibly needing the help of a dye. I had similar issues back in '96 when I put A/C in my '64 Falcon. It's a pain in the butt initially, but once sorted it's forgotten about once everything is OK. Just now it's in the pain in the butt stage. It'll probably be a couple of weeks before I have time to get back to the A/C shop.

 

Thanks, keep us posted on how it goes.