Re: Coupe Quattro 90 air conditioner question.

[rdh@sli.com (Robert D. Houk)]

   Well Mr. Bart, My neighbor has such a piece of equipment at his shop.  My
   A/C in my 4KCSQ has the same symptons.  Just as it would slowly stop
   cooling, I can smell a smell not unlike defrosting ice.  I believe the
   coils are freezing up. Hooked up to the fancy machine , the pressures on
   the high side and low side look just fine.  We pulled the vacumn on the
   system and it held it.  We then charged the system with the specified
   amount of Freon.  Alas..(sigh) the problem persists.  I took it back and we
   put on the machine to check for leaks (we pulled the freon out to see if
   the same amount put in originally was still in the system).  The original
   amount of freon was still in the system.

   Net step.

   Capillary tube.  Anyone ever replaced one ?  How hard is it?  My guess is
   the system cannot sense the temperature and is not cycling the compressor
   thus leading to it iceing up.  Any thoughts anyone?

This happened to mine this summer. One day it just started "crackling"
at me. Hisses, booes, etc. I'm used to, but crackling was a new one. 
The unit was icing up solidly . . .

Replacing the capillary tube was relatively straight-forward, only took
me a minute of jockeying the tube back and forth to get it to re-insert
itself in the channel (hole, tunnel, whatever) that the original tube
hid in.

There's gotta be a catch, right? Nothing is ever that simple, right?

Right! you will spend half of the day taking the whole ****ing dash
apart so you can get at the one screw holding the widget in place,
then another half day putting the WFT all back together again (including
the mandatory run down to the hardware store -- you do have a spare
vehicle, don't you -- to buy one silly little screw that you absolutely
cannot find anywhere in the car -- until you buy the replacement, where-
upon the errant screw exits warp space to reappear right where you're
trying to lever your elbow...).

A hint that has served me immensely-well over the ages. Buy several of
those cheap muffin pans. Each screw (or set of related/identical/etc.
screws), bolt, clip, etc. get puts into "the next" muffin hole se-
quentially as you take the dash apart. Reassembly is usually a fairly
symmetrical operation to disassembly, so you just reverse the order,
pulling bits'n'pieces out of sequentially-in-the-other-direction
muffin holes and fit them back into the dash assembly. If you're doing
something that might "take a while" (for larger values of "while"),
instead of muffin pans, buy one (or more) of those little plastic
parts boxes with lids (aka "tackle boxes"), so you can close up and
"seal in" all the little bits'n'pieces into their separate little
compartments so that, e.g., while you're at the hardware store trying
to find a replacement screw, rover (junior, whatever) doesn't "acci-
dently" scramble all your little bit's'pieces. You can even number
the compartments, then create an index to remind you where each number
belongs (e.g., "13 -- drip pan lower bracket to glove box support").

Have fun -- I sure didn't.

					-RDH