So I've had this 1993 Dodge D250 for maybe a year now, and I am really enjoying it and using it. Had it repainted in the factory color, put some new wheels and tires on it, and I've just been rolling around, hauling lumber, a car trailer, etc. We recently took a camper trailer on a weekend trip and after that I just did a complete brake job including pulling the rear axles, hubs and drums. That was a pain in the ass!
Everything's been good but the AC. It was broken when I bought it, the hoses aren't available, and so I bought everything else I could. Condenser, dryer, compressor, and then I had a local shop make new hoses with modern barrier hose. He used the original Dodge rectangular flanges at the dryer, condenser and H-valve, and brazed new o ring fittings onto the tubing stubs at the latter two so he could make o-ring fitting hoses for them. He did a beautiful job, and I put them all together.. and they wouldn't seal at the flanges. The dryer ones were the worst, with one offset bolt that holds it tight. I tried a couple of kinds of sealant, a couple of sets of gaskets, it wouldn't hold a vacuum.
Finally I got pissed off and decided to throw the condenser and dryer and their E36 M3ty flanges away. I called Vintage Air and bought the condenser, dryer, and hard lines for a C10 kit. I'd previously installed one of those and it seemed like it might fit reasonably well on the Dodge (they don't make a kit for the Dodge , and I wanted to use the factory evaporator, plenum, and controls if I could).
I ended up buying some straight aluminum hard lines from them and bending my own custom hard lines from the condenser through the core support, ending about where the original flange was. Then I mounted the new dryer with a custom bracket where the original was, and we made three new o-ring end hoses to connect all of this.
Yesterday I finally pulled a vacuum on it and was able to charge it, and it's blowing cold. It had a ground issue for the compressor relay that I had to track down also but I resolved that this morning.
Super happy to have AC in this thing! I typed all of this in one post but I'll add pictures in the next one. You can ignore the wall of text for the pics, I just wanted to tell somebody about all of the work!
