AC Condenser Replacement
There are a few YouTube videos on this and one of them said you could fish the condenser in/out behind the upper cooling hose that goes across the front of the grille. I could not figure out for the life of me how to do this. I even broke the tabs off the old one and still couldn't get it out. Maybe I was being too gentle on it.
Instead, I decided to use a wood quick clamp to pinch off the passenger side cooling hose and loosened the drivers side hose clamp that attaches the hose to the radiator. I then separated the clamped hose from the hard pipe and swung the hard pipe up 90 degrees as quickly as I could to get it pointing straight up. My wood clamp rubber pads weren't quite as large as the hose diameter so I was still leaking coolant but at a slow rate. This allowed me to quickly remove the old condenser, throw in the new one, and then reconnect the coolant hoses.
Having rubber quick clamps that have pads that are longer than the hose diameter would have helped reduce that leakage but I only lost about 500ml of coolant which I thought was great.
Maybe this will help someone in the future. I'm sure this is probably pretty common method used by others but figured I'd write it down for future reference.


