I've been tackling a couple of the smaller issues recently trying to get the truck ready to go back into service for us. One of the big items on my list was air conditioning.
So what I did was actually pretty simple, but took me a while to figure out how I was going to do it. There are multiple ways to go about this Air conditioning conversion, but since everyone's swap is a little different, I figured a way that worked for me.
Dave had replaced the air conditioning compressor with a Sanden unit which turned out to have some usable parts for the swap. The advantage of running this type of air conditioning compressor is interchangeability of parts. As it turned out, the Sanden compressor for this truck and the compressor for the Dodge Cummins trucks is the same series (SD7H15). The biggest difference is the compressor head on the back of the unit where the lines of connect.
I was able to remove the compressor head from the GM compressor and install it on the Dodge unit. No modification, it was a direct swap. This allowed me to bolt my factory lines on to the Dodge compressor. The only modifications I needed to do to the lines were remove the big expansion tanks and shorten them. I did all of this myself, but any competent hose or AC shop should be able to do the same thing. By reusing my GM parts and just making some changes to the hoses, all of my pressure switch connections and fill ports were identical to the way they were on the 454.
If someone wanted to do the swap in the future but didn't already have the Sanden compressor for the GM application, you can buy just the compressor head itself. This head is a GT style head.
With the physical connections done, I ran cleaner through the lines/condenser/evaporator, installed the new orifice tube, drier and added oil and refrigerant. I had the compressor manually switched on during the charging and the air conditioning is ice cold... well, 40*F.
I still need to figure out how to switch the compressor on inside the truck. Without a signal from the crank showing the engine running, the computer won't trigger the relay. I'm still working on that and there a couple of fixes I can implement but at least the system itself works. I just figured I would put this out there in case anyone ever needed the info in the future. It seems like there are many different ways to accomplish air conditioning on a swap like this but this used parts I already had, with minimal modification and it seems to work great.
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