We worked on the truck some more this weekend to try to get the A/C working better. The first thing we attempted was to put a 14" fan directly on the condenser, I used the contacts on the trinary switch to trigger it just like we were with the Holly and the PWM fans and I removed the connection to the Holly so it would only run the new fan. Unfortunately the 14" fan directly on the condenser didn't bring the pressure down as far as the PWM fans, so that didn't help.
Our next attempt at fixing it went a little better. I had noticed while looking at the old expansion valve that it is adjustable. I did some googling but really couldn't figure out a process on how to adjust this in a car A/C so I just guessed. We pumped all the refrigerant into a recovery tank, adjusted the valve by 1/2 turn (out), vacuumed the system and recharged. Pressures looked a little better, but not a major change. We did the whole process again, another 1/2 turn out and took it for a test drive. It was evening by this point, but ambient temps were still 103°F, the A/C worked much better. Where before it would never fully recover from a heat soak, now it was recovering within a mile of driving. The next morning we decided to do the whole process again, this time going another full turn out. I'm pretty happy with the performance of the A/C now, we still have the 14" fan installed, but it's no longer running as the PWM fans cool it better. We'll pull the fan out later when we have time.
On to the next project! As I've mentioned, we have some vents for the hood that we need to install, however before I rivet the louvers to the hood, I wanted to do something about the paint. The truck has 4 layers of paint that I can tell, the OG black primer, the OG Blue paint, some sort of silver/blue/clearcoat over the factory blue, and finally a coat of grey primer. We really want to get back to just the factory blue/primer/rust and get rid of the 2 additional coats while preserving the factory paint as much as possible. We spent a couple hours wet sanding one half of the hood just to see what we could come up with. We're pretty happy with the results so far, but there's a lot more work to do. The horizontal surfaces are much easier as a lot of the resprays has eroded away from the sun/heat, the vertical surfaces are going to take quite a bit more time.
I ordered a mini Random Orbital to save the shoulder work so we'll see how that works out later this week. Once we're done cleaning up the paint on the hood, I'll figure out a way to protect what we have left and get the hood vents installed. The rest of the bodywork will take some time to finish.
The part on the front of the hood that looks like we took it down to bare metal is actually the primer in the scratches they put on when they did a quick sanding job before applying the primer coat. With more sanding those will all go away and we'll get down to the base blue. You can also see the darker areas of the blue that still have the silver/clear coat on them. That paint is thicker than the factory paint, so getting through it without going right through the factory paint is tough. It's going to be a lot of work, but I think the finished product will look decent. I'm not really here to discuss whether "patina" is cool or not, I'm just explaining the process I'm using and what my plans are. The truck looks pretty bad with the primer, so getting rid of that at a minimum is necessary.
