A breath of fresh air

Fresh air is great but on those few days in summer it is even nicer if it is freshly chilled.
Better still; in misty Lincolnshire, is the ability to clear your windscreen with dry air thanks to air conditioning.

Reserach

Some forum diving made it clear that a retro fit is a massive pain in the bum and rarely taken on by individuals. Those that have either pay someone to do it or haven't writen a great deal about the experience.

The best forum post I found on the subject was by an Aussy chap called Phil on the T5 forum but this was for a 1.9 so I had to be careful not to get sucked in too  much.

It looked like the parts were expensive and that was the easy bit. Wiring isn't straight forward and usually mixed into the loom of the donor vehicle if buying from a scrap yard.

Nobody seems to make a retro fit loom either so I was looking at a full loom change or some hardcore loom building.

This should be an interesting modification!

Shopping

I bought the front end air conditioning parts from a local guy braking his Caravelle. It comprised the control unit, fan assembly, pipes, compressor and condenser. It was also supposed to include the wiring but the guy was bloody useless and I was lucky to get what I got (took months to get me all the parts he managed). This setup was supposed to have a back end fan that I (stupidly) opted not to have to save the guy time and at the time I wasn't that bothered about it. All in it was £500 and completely useless without wires so there was a long break whilst I tried to find said wiring.

In the mean time I came across a back end heater and aircon fan with all of its pipes and wiring for £100. I fancied this as a possible camping heater mod later so picked it up on the way to get my new GSXR400 track bike. This was pretty much complete and filled in a lot of the holes in my current setup.

Due to having no wiring loom there was no point in me fitting this stuff so it all got chucked in the shed for future use.
A later purchase of a Webasto block heater would add to this pile which included a load more pipe work and another rear blower. More importantly however it also included a full wiring loom from a T5 shuttle.
I was now spurred to lay everything out and see what I could make from this stack of parts.
After a bit of mixing and matching I had a full air conditioning system.

I was briefly confused as to why the pump side didn't seem to connect together till I remembered the condenser (which would fit in between[duh!]) was already fitted to my van back when my intercooler went pop. Great less to do!
 The wiring loom was chopped into one evening and the bits I wanted were extracted. I now had the air con wiring loom and the blower loom that I got earlier. All I was missing was the engine bay bits which could come later.

Okay let's do this

Aside from bits added at opportune moments, like the condenser, I was in no hurry to start this job.

The time finally came however and I decided to drag the van round to the garage for an afternoons work.

I planned to drop the blower unit out of the dash and feed the wiring in with it out of the way. once the lower dash panels and glove box were out however it became very clear that more would need to come off to accomplish this. A quick check of the Haynes manual confirmed this; to the tune of the full dash, brace, steering rack and gear shift. Wow!

There was no way this was getting done in an afternoon so I took my time.
I grabbed the opportunity to maintain and fix bits as I went along including the well known cup holder fix you can see on the left.
The pin breaks away from the flimsy body of the drawer letting the cup holder ping out under spring pressure onto the floor with your brew.
This was fixed by drilling two elongated holes and passing a tie wrap through to hold the cup holder to the body of the drawer. I did this to both sides as a precaution so I didn't have to take this off again (hopefully).
The unit was thoroughly cleaned and some white grease was sprayed on the moving parts.
These units are something like £159 to replace so a cheeky (and fairly tidy) bodge like this was most welcome.

 Having had the dash off before it didn't take too long and the rest was fairly straight forward with a quick look over the Haynes manual before I got stuck in.
The steering column and gear shift were "displaced" rather than removed by removing the upper bolts and lying them on the floor still connected at the bottom.
With them and the brace off there is nothing holding the blower unit on bar some wires and the heat exchanger hoses. These were popped off and the unit was manipulated out of the van. Sounds easy and it was really. Bar the hoses, they were a fiddly twat.
 Next the van was prepped for the new blower with added condenser for the air-conditioning.
This would need a new hole in the bulkhead which VW had kindly left push out rectangles in the insulation for. I used some hole saws which were shit so ended up using a cone cutter; making three 32mm holes then filing to a wobbly sausage hole. This was tidied up and painted once the hole was the right size.

By now I had run out of Sunday afternoon so work was carried out in my evenings after work. At least the weather just stuck to a steady drizzle all week for me.
 The blower loom I had previously broken from the donor vans main loom was dragged out and laid up. It was really simple looking so shouldn't take long.
It was also the wrong bit of the loom. *sigh*.
The plugs for the blower were clearly wrong and for a rear blower. Somehow I now had two different rear blower looms so I went back to the main loom and spent an hour picking out the bits I actually wanted.
This time I started again with the correct (and far more complicated) loom. Some bits were straight forward like the blower, control plugs and the little temp sensor on the right. This chap plugs into the blower housing behind the gear shift column. The rest of the loom went to either the fuse box of common coloured wires in the loom.
As I would be cutting into the loom I removed the original one. This got me in the ball park for where my new loom would go too so was worth the added effort.
Fuse positions were estimated from those removed and the help of the fuse box cards. Obviously there was some soldering to do as one end of each fuse needed adding to a main power line of the same colour. This takes a bit of digging in the loom but can be easily judged from the length of each donor wire that I had carefully cut off as long as I could.  Its worth mentioning here that these wires are fat. Thus you need a big soldering iron to get the heat into them or they just wont solder together. I started with a wireless soldering iron but it just wasn't up to the job so I ended up using my Hakko soldering station ramped up to 400 degrees.

 The other soldering job was any common wires for which there was an earth, some shared power and two Can-Bus wires.

Can-Bus wires are length critical (well they can be and I wasn't about to test the theory) so despite the fact that the same color wire pairs were everywhere I had to find out where they all came together.
I eventually figured out their meeting place was under the floor just under the gear shift. As it happens the Webasto goes to the same place so I went and soldered these all together at the same time.
 I ended up doing a whole lot of wiring whilst here as I really didn't fancy stripping the van down like this again any time soon. It's a pain and far to easy to damage stuff in the process.
The rear heater controls went in along with the loom. Again I ended up using the more complicated of the two as it was clear that the simpler loom, that came with the rear blower I was fitting, drew power from somewhere down the back (via a purple plug) that I couldn't guarantee I had a connection for and might use rear controls. The loom I opted for terminates under the passenger seat with three block connectors then heads down the back thus giving me the chance to leave the later bit for later.
I had been checking things as I was going along whenever I had a section done. So far I had a working front blower with no motion from the re-circulation or reaction from the AC button which I thought was related to the lack of engine loom. Before wrapping up at the end; I connected the rear blower and tested again. Now both front and rear fans worked fully so they must be interconnected somehow.

*Spoiler* This bit doesn't work.

There was one other wiring job that needed doing and that was a Toad A850 alarm that had been sat in the garage for nearly as long as the aircon. The plus point of this unit was that it uses the remote central locking signal to arm/disarm making my key bunch nice and tidy.
The alarm was purchased cheap off of ebay with no instructions but I had figured out what each wire did and labeled them so this shouldn't be too painful with the help of some van wiring diagrams.
The easy bits like sonic sensors, led and button were plugged in and loosely put in place for now.
I found the indicator wires (black/green, black/white) second time round going to the BCU (not to the switch they are not the wires you are looking for!) and and door open signal (black) twelveteenth time lucky. the siren and door pin switch wires were stuck in the bonnet area and siren located. Finally an earth and power source were found for a basic setup.
A quick check gave me a twin chirp and indicator flash when the unit powered on and the LED would flash on a button press for alternative arming.
This was as far as I got however as I could not find a door lock wire that the alarm would accept to arm/diarm the alarm. A quick look online found other hitting the same issue and the only answer was to remove the unit all together. Bum.
Any wires I had broken insulation on were taped up then the whole loom was carefully taped back together and van fully rebuilt.

Three out of four wiring jobs being successful wasn't too bad going and it had only taken me from Sunday lunch to Saturday Lunch with evenings in between to achieve.

There is still more to do with the rear fan, plumbing, pump and engine bay wiring yet to do which you will see on here in the not too distant future (honestly!). So  come back a little later and I might have more for you.