Re: [T3] Factory air.

["Jim Adney" <jadney@vwtype3.org>]

On 21 Feb 2001, at 17:21, Simon Glen wrote:

> This brochure in those four different languages was intended for the
> non-American market; i.e. places like Germany, France, Spain and in
> Africa and the Middle East.  Indeed, I obtained my brochure from the
> VW distributor in Nigeria in West Africa where dealers at the time
> were urging customers to specify air conditioning for their VWs if
> they picked them up tax-free in Europe prior to shipping them home
> overseas.  In other words, the air conditioning was installed by
> Volkswagen in their German factories.

It sounds like VW made arrangements with the dealer installed A/C 
manufacturer to gather some of those systems into Germany for 
installation into cars which had been purchased thru the Tourist 
Purchase program. This way they could get the same car that they 
would have bought if they had just picked it up at their dealer at 
home.

All the air cooled A/C systems I have ever seen were the same, 
and clearly not factory installed. In the type 3 the intake fan 
housing has to be cut away and the cooling air intake 
compromised in order to get the belt drive out to the compressor. 
The air cleaner then is turned about 20 deg which keeps its halves 
from sealing and prevents the air intake from connecting to the 
clean air in the cooling air intake plenum in the rear.

The other thing to note is that there are no A/C parts of any kind on 
the parts lists of any air cooled VW at least up thru the mid 70s. 
There is no M-code for air conditioning for any of these cars.

> In other words, the air conditioning was installed by
> Volkswagen in their German factories.

This may be the impression that the brochure was meant to lead 
you to, but I think it is much more likely that the VW Tourist 
Purchase program hired independent shops, or created some of 
their own, to install these parts after the "finished" cars left the 
factory. It would certainly be interesting to see one of these cars; 
I'd like to know if they were actually better done.

Of course I have seen cars where this job was better and worse 
than average, since it really did depend on the person doing it. But 
there is no way around the fact that if I want to run a belt from point 
A to point B and there is a sheet metal wall in the way, I will have 
to make some holes in that wall.

The real problem here is really just the design of the type 3 engine. 
There really just is no way to connect a compressor to it nicely 
because of the way the intake air ducting surrounds the pulley. The 
situation is much better with the type 1 and 4 engines.

A few years ago I spend a couple of years trying to pin down a 
problem with the A/C in an American car owned by a co-worker. 
The problem was electrical and I finally determined that this A/C 
was not factory installed. I was very surprised to find that, in this 
case, both possibilities existed, and that they looked the same 
externally, but used different parts, and different wiring, internally.

Anyway, after slaving away at the problem for a few months I finally 
found out who made the dealer installed kit, called them in Fort 
Worth, and got a schematic. I don't remember their name, but I 
wonder if it might have been the same place.... They were an 
independent company and made these kits for lots of cars. They 
were not a subsidiary of any car company. I finally fixed the 
problem by adding a diode in the ground return lead of the 
compressor clutch solenoid which would prevent leakage backward 
thru the circuit which had been latching a relay on, which kept the 
cooling fan running too long after shutdown, and killed the battery.

What I'm working slowly up to saying is that I think it is very 
unlikely that VWoA had a manufacturing "subsidiary" who made 
A/C parts just for them. This was more likely a company who bid 
on this job and sold the parts to VWoA; more of a subcontractor. 
This was probably just a stretch in the marketing hype in your 
brochure.

I'd like to hear from Russ on a couple of things here: 

1) To your knowledge, were there any truly factory installed type 3 
A/Cs?

2) Have you ever seen a type 3 purchased thru the Tourist 
Purchase program with A/C? 

3) If so, how did the installation compare?

4) Did the A/C installed on type 1 and 4 engines cause the same 
overheating problems that the type 3s had?

-
Jim Adney
jadney@vwtype3.org
Madison, WI 53711-3054
USA

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