no you cant just refill the ac system with stuff from autozone. afte its been opened up like you want to do.
if you open up the ac lines you will need to replace the reciever dryer and the orfice tube at minumum before havin someone with a vaccum machine to suck the air and what moister they can out of the system. not a good idea if you can avoid it.
Are you serious With all the pulled motors I have seen on this site, in peoples garages! All had the condenser removed. Surely not everyone is an HVAC guy that has the "proper tools"
I do harbor frieght vacuum pump and a set of gauges from napa. Ecc is right, if you want to do it right you need to replace those once opened up. While you can plug the ports on the receiver dryer to save it, you need to make damn sure air cant get in it. I would replace the orfice tube though. If you dont wanna go through that mess of sucking it down and putting freon in, take it to a shop. Most mom and pop places charge you .5-1 hour plus freon to recharge. Just adding freon after putting it back together will make for poor cooling.
Your lines can be under 150-200 psi of pressure with truck off. The "bad way" is to put a screw driver on the shrader valve under one of those black caps on your ac line. The right way is to have a shop recover the freon first. I wont say what way i did it but i dont have a recovery machine at home and i didnt stop at a shop first
I did head gaskets, studs and set the lash on my truck and I'm only 20 so don't get too scared. On the AC system just put rubber plugs or caps off like gear oil bottles in the open ports. You will want to have a shop draw a vaccum on it for at least 45 minutes before re-charging.
You can flip the condenser over the fender and get it out of the way without disconnecting any lines. I've done it several times. Once I had the hard line that runs from the condenser to the evaporator (the same line the orifice tube is in) crack because it had been almost completely rubbed through by the plastic clip that holds it to the bracket under the air intake. Anyway, you don't have to open up the A/C system.
Just to clarify, you don't actually totally flip it over the fender. You kind of hook the lines over so one is on one side of the fender and the other is on the other side.