Easy trick to make VA control look nice (Re: 66 factory A/C car to vintage air) Dear Bill and V-8 Buick cool cats, . . . . The Vintage Air controls will give you better control of the air conditioner, so it is a practical choice. There is a guy on the V-8 Buick board who wanted to use the 3 knob Vintage Air controller and simply used some surplus radio control knobs for that year as the control knobs. That way everything still looked period correct while allowing you the modern convenience. Just a thought, Edouard
even easier then. if you could convert the old controls to electronic however that would be the bomb. you can get those that are stacked top to bottom and mount them in the chrome part of the oem control. otherwise your going to have a hole where the oem ones where or dead oem ones. https://www.carid.com/vintage-air/gen-iv-control-panel-vertical-black-mpn-491226-rva.html these and use your oem control panel cut a hole in it for these somehow would work nice. now a way you could use the oem controls they are just potentiometers so you could basically take it apart and mount the 66 levers to the switches back in behind it this is a potentiometer http://www.digikey.com/product-deta....medium=cpc&&gclid=CI2aoOW3zNECFcO4wAod_MsBgA so it could be mounted however you need and extended wire wise. http://shop.hotrodscustomstuff.com/vintage-air-gen-iv-proline-rectangle-controls/ might be able to make this work with the oem knobs to look oem also just thinking aloud
I had thought that I might be able to add an extra ac vent where the controls were with a little creative drive. Just being "creative"!
you could do that idk if it would have any advantage though. plus to make it look clean would be a challenge. are you keeping the big pot metal piece around the radio and cluster that mounts to the dash?
somebody already mounted a DIN chassis radio in the hole so that area has been pre-butchered for me. Not sure yet what I'll do there yet but I have a plasma cutter and a mig-tig so I can probably make just about anything I want if my talent will allow it. I also have the advantage of a full sheetmetal shop at work(I teach an aviation maintenance course for A&P's) so I can cut, shear, bend, roll etc. to whatever limit I feel I want. Should help me build a console for it I hope. I just can't wait to move the car in the shop when it's done and I can start getting stupid with it. I hope all the body bolts come out okay because I intend on doing the 5.3 with the body off the chassis at some point. I'm hoping for good things!
mine had a place on it on the radio also I used a delete panel off a special to cover it. you could make a whole new panel out of sheet metal instead of the pot metal. the issue you will have you cant weld the pot metal stuff so if you want to use it you will need to figure out things like that. just depends how oem you want the inside to be. my car will look totally stock. inside other than having the chrome painted aluminum rather than chrome.
