A/C charging

JOSHAZSKIN

MEMBER
1988 LINCOLN TOWN CAR
5.0L
V8
2WD
AUTOMATIC
44,000 MILES

I don't know much about cars and have the car listed above. It's the Cartier model and has around 40,000 original miles on it. So, I want to be sure before I try anything is there somewhere to charge the air conditioning system or does it have some older kind of air conditioning system that I can't do that with?

1 Reply

KASEKENNY

MECHANIC
18,907 POSTS

You do not need anything special for this, but I would suggest a different approach just because of how this vehicle was built.

More than likely if it is original, it has not been retrofitted to R-134A and is still R-12 refrigerant. If this is the case, then it is going to be very expensive to recharge this system. R-12 is very damaging to the o-zone, so it has been retired from use. You can now upgrade your system to R-134A for much cheaper than trying to repair this one.

So now it is about $100.00 per pound the last time I checked (which was a few years ago) and you need at least three pounds of Freon.

Here are some videos of recovering the freon but what I would suggest is you just call an A/C repair company, and they will most likely have everything you need to recover anything that is left in the system. Basically, you don't want to open the system and allow this to the ozone as it will be harmful. So, they have a waste tank that they can come and pull everything out of it.

Then you can replace the lines and seals as stated below to fit the new Freon.

https://youtu.be/4EqdrBVb0sY

https://www.2carpros.com/articles/air-conditioner-how-to-add-freon

Once you have the car fitted for R134A then you can fill it with the guide above.

Please run through this and let us know what you find. Thanks

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