Well, I thought I had this all figured out. A little frustrated right now.

I have passenger side of the dash, console and gauge cluster disassembled. In the engine bay the compressor and condenser have been removed. I have the replacement cover for the firewall.

Right now I have the big a/c vent in the dash making me miserable. In the way or virtually everything. It's loose and just won't quite pull out. I think I will have to drop the column slightly and unseat the driver's side dash to get the wiggle room to remove it. p.i.t.a

Looks like the duct for the defrost & floor heat are separate.

Here's my question: am I missing something or can it just go away ? Is it serving some purpose that will make me regret taking it out permanently? Anybody dealt with this?

thanks

 

I took all mine out. I don't have any of the vent that go to the dash A/C vents.

 

I guess we’ve all been there. Got frustrated. Stepped away, had some beer therapy and a night’s sleep.

Yesterday I dug out the service manual and took a fresh look. For what it’s worth to anyone in a similar spot here’s what I found.

I took the octopus head off the console control and checked each color coded line individually with a Mityvac. Two failed and naturally they are in the worst possible locations. From what I can tell the actuators these connect to have two lines and operate in the direction of vacuum.

One is the tan line which toggles the a/c diverter door. I see now that it’s not a cable but vacuum operated – and that the actuator is buried behind the heater box. Joy. According the service manual tan is for the a/c setting and pink is for heat. Pink line is OK. Since I did an a/c delete I can live with that. I suppose that means that I couldn’t send hot air through the a/c plenums if I wanted to – which maybe I would on a chilly day. Belatedly I realized that every other vehicle I have does that and this one should be no different.

The other was the red line to the defroster flapper. Blue moves the actuator arm up and is for ‘de-fog’ and is OK. Red should move the arm down and is for ‘de-ice’ and won’t hold vacuum. Not really sure what the difference is between the de-fog and de-ice vs heat is just yet but I have a repro owner's manual on the way. I’m going to try to reach in and disconnect it and check the actuator directly with the vacuum pump. Changing this actuator is only possible if I can get that #$%!! a/c crossover vent out somehow. I do have to free up the driver’s side dash to do that. Done that once and not anxious to do it again right away.

As long as the heater core isn’t leaking, and I don’t think it is, I’m going to button it all back up and just use what I’ve got this season. Maybe next winter it’ll get torn down – and by then I’m sure I’ll have a new list of things that need to be fixed.If I do tear it down I'll put a new core in anyway to avoid having to do it all again.

I opened up the dash, gauge cluster and console to fix a seat belt lamp bezel that had fallen back inside, replace the blower switch, fix the console controls and replace several blown bulbs and a couple of bad sockets, replace a mouse eaten shifter boot, vacuum out turds, nuts, nesting material etc etc. Did all that at least.