Removing ac condenser

General information about the first-generation Nissan Maxima in the US. What was the Datsun 810 became the luxury leader Maxima in the US in 1981.

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Dairy
Posts: 48
Joined: 13 years ago
Location: SD

Removing ac condenser

#1

Post by Dairy »

Does anyone know how to remove the ac condenser or at least help me out with draining it? Also how did the belt run for it. Did it have the same belt that is connected to the alternator?
82 maxima ld28 200K
Carimbo
Posts: 467
Joined: 18 years ago

#2

Post by Carimbo »

A/C refrigerant is extremely harmful to the atmosphere. Best to have a shop that can recycle the refrigerant evacuate (drain?) the system so it doesn't escape into the atmosphere.

Belt was separate, its own belt, looped around the other (frontmost) crank pulley and its own adjustable idler/tensioner.
Dairy
Posts: 48
Joined: 13 years ago
Location: SD

#3

Post by Dairy »

I understand its very harmful. My car only has two main pulleys?
82 maxima ld28 200K
Carimbo
Posts: 467
Joined: 18 years ago

#4

Post by Carimbo »

A-yup, 2 pulleys on the crankshaft dampner sounds about right.
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asavage
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#5

Post by asavage »

Dairy wrote:I understand its very harmful.
Let me put my two cents in here . . .

Back in the day, say the 1950s, flash-frozen food (vegetables, fries) was frozen by running wire-mesh conveyors through a bath of Freon (a registered trademark of the Dupont corporation, I think it's the public name for diclorodifluoromethane, from the top-of-my-head. Let me Google that . . . yup, I remembered it right. It was a test question in my tech training in 1980; I had to be able to spell it correctly! ).

We're not talking about sealed units, these baths were open to the atmosphere, and tons of Freon were lost per day!

Compare that to the 20 ounces of R12 in a fully-charged automobile A/C system.

I would not be too worried about evacuating an R12 system to the atmosphere, myself. In a professional shop situation, that's different, where you might recover 10-100 pounds of the stuff per year, in addition to being able to filter and resell R12 (which is what we did, the last shop I worked at). The price of purchasing R12 is really high, so recycling it makes good economic sense.

But don't beat yourself up that you're destroying the planet if you open up your Maxima's A/C system and let the poisonous R12 out.

(I got the flash-frozen vegetables info from a food technologist that I worked with in 1989, who was there in the 50s. At the time, we were both working for a company that still builds custom food-processing equipment, huge stuff that fries 50,000 lbs of french fries per day, that sort of thing.)
My car only has two main pulleys?
IIRC, one sheave on the crankshaft damper drives the fan, water pump, alternator. The other is for the A/C compressor only. Do I have that right?
Regards,
Al S.

1982 Maxima diesel wagon, 2nd & 4th owner, 165k miles, rusty & burgundy/grey. Purchased 1996, SOLD 16Feb10
1983 Maxima diesel wagon, 199k miles, rusty, light yellow/light brown. SOLD 14Jul07
1981 720 SD22 (scrapped 04Sep07)
1983 Sentra CD17, 255k, bought 06Jul08, gave it away 22Jun10.
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