Years ago at a swap meet I picked up the under-dash AC unit for my 914, and the stubby center console to go along with it. I ended up putting it in storage because I but didn't want to sacrifice the horsepower to the A/C compressor,. For me most drives are spirited but generally 30 minutes to an hour.

This got me thinking about an alternative approach that would involve placing a medium sized chest cooler in the frunk (large enough to hold a couple bags of ice or chill pack equivalents) and plumbing the lines from the under dash unit to the frunk into cooler, adding a boat sump pump tied to the A/C blower fan, and using a chilled water approach to getting coolant to the under dash unit.

My question to the group is has anyone tried this and would ~40 quarts of icy water provide much cooling for very long?

I know I should just bite the bullet and get the classic auto air upgraded compressor...

Been done many times, but usually an ice chest with a fan in front of the passenger seat. Does work until the ice melts. Modern rotary compressors do not use much hp, so I wouldn’t waste my time with ice.

And you would be adding water vapor to an all ready to rust vehicle!

Just to clarify what I'm proposing would be a semi-closed system - the chilled water would flow from the ice chest to the under dash A/C unit and back. You would only open it up to refill ice or drain the water out.

But to your point I should revisit a rotary compressor solution. Thanks!

-Perrysan

I installed the Classic Auto Air kit into my '74 914. I did modify mine to mount the compressor on top of the engine, though. I can confirm that the hp loss from a modern compressor is minimal. When it's 100+ degrees down here in August, it's super nice having the A/C cranking away - cooling you down. With that said, installing it took many hours. However, I did have help from others here on the forum - namely dlee6204. If interested check out his A/C thread:

http://www.914world.com/bbs2/index.php?sho...192917&st=0