GMC Motorhome: Ruby, you have company…

Understandably, the idea of actually having a real dash AC has touched a nerve……. I too feel it’s about time to throw this baby out with the bath water and start again…. even if you see your coach as a retro time machine hey… man today cannot live without air conditioning!  Being the fish bowl that the front of our coach recreates, having cold air coming at you from the front wellllllll, if you can do it you probably should.

Look back in past “Ruby dash AC” stuff that box up front has several obtuse duct bends that limit it’s output like that long neck bird trying to swallow that frog with his hands around the birds neck caption “never give up”…. but there’s just no way strong air flow will eve come out of that thing.  Heck even the prototype engineers at GM were messing with the original design on #41!   .Bet they KNEW it sucked!  Hey so “lets fix this” as I said must have hit a nerve because now I’ve had 2 coaches come in that want this update as soon as I figure it out!

So I guess that means I need to get on with it! 

One of the dash AC upgrades is going into Tom’s “Texas Tux” who blew in yesterday morning from Texas .  Sorry guys, a terrible pic but it was late yesterday when we finished going over all the things we’ll be doing to the coach  I knew I was getting old but Tom reminded me it was 18 years ago when I had done a total interior & exterior restoration on Texas Tux…….. man it neat, coaches are coming back to the fold after years of use.  Most come in from a recent sale by the new owners this time Tom has used the coach and now wants to take it to the next step……. hey, this is it, time to get out there and go, tomorrow may be too late! 

Texas Tux gets a dash redo that I did 18 years ago…… cool!  And we’re going all the way….a 1976 model with the type 2 dash still uses that silly heat/cool box.  Not only are we also installing one of the big Mac Daddy dash…. Texas Tx gets the dash AC…. very neat.  Another coach, a older club coach is updating their Mac dash and doing the AC too…….. Man, by the time I blow through these I should be pretty good at it?  Gotta make sure this old dog gets this new trick…….

Another advantage of this process, I’ll be able to pair down the firewall electrical system to somewhere close to this before building each coach back again.  It was simply amazing all the hoopra that went along with that dash AC system.  Obviously there was at least 1 messy engineer working on this motorhome project…. I’m just sayin…….  Hey and how bout THIS… #41 is again being the prototype it was originally doing this new dash AC project!  Pretty appropriate don’tcha think Cedric?

So lets talk about it a bit… we’ve donr step 1…. namely tearing the old completely out.  When I say completely it’s important to do that.  There are no wires to be reused in the old system.  For possible future maintenance and repair, the new dash AC system will have it’s own harness so tracing issues can be easier.  I hate it when I have to dig down through that wire wad… hey, most of you guys know what I mean!  I’m not wiring like you see some with rows of terminals and fuse blocks like an aircraft….. it will be wired for an average technician can follw the system like he would in most everything he works on.  If something is wired well but not in the way a future mechanic would recognize… what good is it?  Another point on the next step… selecting a dash AC/heat system…… it needs to make it through several filters to be the one we want.  OK… what are those filters?

1 It needs to fit…. we have many installation options so the choice could be wide… which fits this application.

2 There needs to be access to the entire system…. it kills me when someone puts in something you can’t work on!

3 It cannot have parts that cannot be replaced.  Don’t care how good it is, if it can’t be fixed when it breaks it’s kinda like one of those Chinese scooters! 

4  It’s gotta blow the wig off of Washington!  The cab size this dash AC will blow into is huge compared to the cars these aftermarket units were designed for.  We need some CFM!

We need 4 “home run” heat/cool vents and a top firing defrosted duct to tie into the original vent system at the front of the dash..

Piece-o-cake right?  Well, this is my next task… to find that perfect unit for this project…….. stay tuned and lets see who gets our award…….

On another note…… remember my front end crash with Ralph recently?    Well I must tell you GEICO exceeded my expectations and we settled on a price where I could keep Ralph and fix him back up.  You might say why fix up a 400,000 mile car?  Oh Ralph is special…. I bond to any tired critter I drive and Ralph is very special.  It belonged to Ralph K., the engineer who designed all the Fire Fight Product auto deploy vehicle fire suppression systems we sell now… a great guy and a great car…. fit me like a glove but with it’s foopa we had to figure out something…… There’s really no reason to bring it back to stock… it could crap out at any time…. but you know I’d probably be nuts enough to fix it then too….. anyway, was talking to the guys on what could we do and not go crazy……. they surprised me yesterday afternoow with a new and improved Ralph ………… Meet “Mountainman Ralph”   Andy, that’s your Tow Bar………. Looks just like the Offroad Sidekick I found on Google!  Ralph is no more a mere mortal… it has an attack angle now!  For fun, do a Google search for “Suzuki sidekick offroad” and you’ll see where Mountainman Ralph got his props… and we can take it further from here!  Will look awesome behine JayGee    I’ve always felt if you ever get a chance to impress someone you need to just throw something out there! 

So time has flown, it’s going on 8am… the guys are showing up and I need to get out there on Ruby’s dash……. picking the new dash AC system today… stay tuned…..

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