A/C Problems

[blown62falcon]

ok ford techies here's one for you guys. I had my a/c serviced yesterday ($165) and the a/c worked fine for about 1 minute and then took it back to the shop and the tech said the air gap was to wide for the a/c to engage. after the tech took a long screwdriver he tapped the a/c clutch it engaged. works great for now. today the wife and i went on a 400 mile round trip to see our son, left at 5am arrived at 8:20am, a/c worked great. now on the way back filled up with 91 octane and had to tap the a/c clutch to engage it and after about 500ft the a/c clutch disengaged so that is my problem why did the a/c disengage after putting the car in drive and only traveling a short distance? did this 4 more times on the way home. thanks for your help. The a/c works fine if the car is at an idle and in park.

Car in question: 1997 Ford Taurus SHO.

 

[JRA2000TL]

Not sure of the difficulty of getting to the compressor on a Gen 3, but your clutch gap is out of spec. You will need to remove the center nut from the a/c clutch, remove the clutch face (thin disk); between there and the actual clutch pulley are small washers (shims). You'll need to remove one and reinstall the clutch face. This should tighten the gap, and the compressor should engage/disengage on its own. I fixed my 95's a/c by doing this.

 

[blown62falcon]

thank you for responding. i have about 2.5" of clearance to do this. i will have to call the ford house to see how they do this.

 

[SHOZ123]

I did mine from below with a 3/8" impact wrench and a long wobbly extension.

 

[Liquid_force]

I had about the same symptoms when I bought my '99 in Sept.
I got through the winter obviously, but this spring had to get in there and get the shim out. It's basically just a tiny washer.

In the '99 there was <1" btw the face of the compressor and the adjacent sheet metal and I saw no reasonable way to get a tool in there to remove it.

Supposedly the sub-frame can be lowered enough to get clearance, but I was unable to get that to work. I may have messed it up by trying to loosen the right side SF bolts instead of the front bolts. After an hour or so of messing with the sub frame I just ended up unbolting the compressor. Not that hard to do except that a couple of the bolts are hard to get to.

Had I started off just removing the a/c bolts I think I would have completed it in a couple hours.