Air-conditioned turbo?

George Koenig of Mountain Home, Arkansas, likes his Corvairs his way. His '66 Corsa 180 turbo wasn't offered with air-conditioning from the factory, so he departed from stock and added it himself. He says it wasn't easy, but it was well worth it. It was 103 degrees in Mississippi when he left for Daytona. Along the way and on the return trip which spanned 3000 miles, he had no problems and recorded gas mileage in the 23-24 mpg range.

Curious about the installation, I asked George what was involved. He explained he didn't want to cut up the trunk, so he mounted the condenser unit, a stock package from Classic Car Air in Tampa, Florida, in the rear, as shown in the picture, below right. Two cores, one in front of the other are mounted with a fan behind them pulling air from under the car, exhausting it inside the engine compartment.

The condenser had to be placed on the left side because of the turbo and muffler on the right. This meant relocating the battery and losing the spare tire storage area, which he says he would have lost anyway because of the placement of the A/C compressor, a stock A6. The evaporator is stock Corvair from a '66 Monza. He says if he had it to do again, he might still do it the same way, even if he does it differently on the '64 Monza coupe he is currently restoring. On that car, he'll put the condenser in the trunk.

George's Corsa was originally Danube Blue. While restoring it, he couldn't decide on a color. "The little paint chips don't really tell what a whole car will look like," he said. Then, one day he saw a '93 Cadillac parked in front of a restaurant that he thought looked really sharp. Nobody was in it, so he waited for the owner to return, introduced himself and together they looked up the paint code in the car's glove box.

The Corsa's body was pretty straight to begin with, and after the original paint was soda-blasted (stripped), there were no dents, rust or bondo. "Some people would kill for that," he commented.

PPG basecoat/clear coat was used to give the turbo car its new, metallic finish. It looks great in the pictures and even better viewed with the naked eye.