Sunday, May 19, 2019

Preparing for Ford Nationals - AC Part 9 - Vent Routing & Wiring

I started working on the various interior vents and ducting after work on Wednesday this week.  I expected running the ducts and connecting the vents to be a very easy process.  However, it is rather frustrating as you are able to do very little without removing a considerable amount of interior parts.

On Wednesday, I thought I'd connect the defrost vents but spent most of the time removing the instrument cluster, radio, and other parts just to get to the nuts which held in my stock defrost vent.  I then did not get around to installing the Classic Auto Air defrost vents until after work on Thursday evening.

The stock defrost vent will not work with the Classic Auto Air system.  The ones supplied with the kid are actually rather cheap.  They looked like they might just be hand molded from sheets of ABS plastic and then glued together.  They don't even come with holes drilled to mount them in place.  They are one part of this system which seem a little cheap.



The duct hose is expected to be slid over the end of the vent and then zip tied in place.  As you can tell from the picture above, the end where the duct tubing connects is actually tapered.  This would cause the zip tie and duct tube to just fall off.  I purchased some very thin double sided tape, put it around the duct, slid the tube over it, used some black duct tape around it to hold it all in place, and then put a zip tie around it.  This should work.  

I did the same with the center console vents and then realized the black plastic piece which attaches to the stock vent is too large to fit through the front of the dash.  I then had to take it all apart, put the stock vent back in, and then put it all back together while installed in the car.




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