So now, evidently my Air Conditioning clutch went out? does anyone know about these? it is easy to replace, the dealer wants $125 for the part and labor (it's $250 total but they are splitting the cost).
Also, now my car idles weird. When I'm at a stop light, it will fluctuate very frequently between 1000 and 1500 rpms.
Mike
91 CRX
I helped a friend do one last year. Do you know which condenser you have? I believe there are two, a Matsushita and Sanden (I think I spelled those right...). The Matsushita has three bolts in a triangular pattern.
He had the later, the Sanden, and we had to rent three special tools, IIRC, then later found we actually needed a fourth:
- Clutch holder. This will allow you to extract the center bolt.
- Small flywheel puller. Once you get this off, there should be a a few of shims. And then there will be a snap ring. Remove the snap ring.
- Pulley puller; this is not a general pulley puller either. Once you get the clutch rotor off remove the field coil. It is held in with a snap ring. Don't forget to disconnect the single wire too.
Installation is pretty much in the reverse order. You may run into a problem when you go to install the clutch rotor. There is a special tool that will press it back down. I believe it's called a "shaft ring remover". We didn't realize this until we got to this point and we ended up going down to the local Honda dealer and had the technician press it down for us and he was cool in that he installed the rest of the pieces for us ~ charged us $20 (USD).
You will also need to check the flywheel gap (this is set by the shims). I don't recall the gap off hand but can get it for you.
The Matsushita, doesn't require as many special tools as I understand it. I believe this a single pulley puller. But I don't know for sure.
The bulk of the work is getting the compressor out. I suppose you can try to do it while it's in the car but it's much easier to do it with it out. For this, you will need to have the AC system discharged. We took the AC belt off, drove down to a local shoppe that does AC recharging and had them discharge the system. They charged something like $10 for this. And because we took the car back to them to have it re-charged, they cut him a deal.
So... having said all this, you may want to have a qualified shoppe do the work. The price you quoted sounds about right.
FWIW, the normal idle speed (for USA Si's) should be 550 rpm (+/- 50 rpm) with all the accessories off and with the AC on, it should be 810 rpm (+/- 50 rpm). I can see how a bad clutch can cause the idle to go erratic. My recommendation, if you are not planning to get this serviced right-away, is to remove the AC belt. But don't wait too long since you don't want the compressor itself to *dry* (there is oil in the system that helps lubricate the internals of the compressor).
Robert K. Kuhn
CRX Owners Group President (http://www.crx.org/southcal)
1990 Honda CRXsi (http://drive.to/jiggy)
ICQ # 3714283 (nickname: godzilla)
