Air Conditioning for Mechanical Dummies

R134a recharge cylinder

At one time you could find dozens (if not hundreds) of "how-to" websites around the internet, only a few of which have survived – for which you should thank whatever god(s) you pray to. If you wanted to know how to, let's say, adjust the master widget on your household's disengaging frammis, you just googled the question (or Bnged it, we suppose), and there on your screen were detailed instructions. Sometimes they were pretty good (if you hit a professional site), but sometimes they weren't. Every once in a while the instructions you found were just plain awful: awful like the post "How to Convert R12 to R34"¹ for which Baptist Johnson collected ten bucks or so at eHow; even though he couldn't be troubled to change the title to reflect the fact that there's no such thing as "R34" in the world of automotive A/C – it's R134A.

When you found those hypothetical instructions for adjusting your frammis's master widget, you'd expect to find a list of the necessary tools and supplies, followed by (you'd hope, anyway) step-by-step instructions. Well, that's what our man Baptist supplied for the folks who chose to trust eHow's content. According to him, you'd need conversion and charging kits, R134A refrigerant, and a pair of gloves. Starts off on the right foot, eh?

And then Johnson's "instructions" begin, and you suddenly realize that they've been written by a total dumbass. Why? Because step number one is "Drive your vehicle to an R-12 Freon professional. Instruct the professional to evacuate the R-12 Freon from your air conditioning system. According to the EPA, only licensed professionals are allowed to purchase or handle R-12 Freon." Baptist continues in that vein, instructing you to "instruct the professional" through two additional steps before you reach the point where you're actually doing (some of) the work. We found his other instructions quite amusing for their content, since he likes to tell you to do things like "Return to the hood area of your vehicle."  "Hood area"? Is this dumbass joking? And there's also the laughably overworded

"Check your dashboard to see if your engine is running at 2,000 rpm. If not, feather the gas pedal until your engine reaches 2,000 rpm."

What would you do if your dashboard lacks a tachometer, Baptist? You did mean "instrument panel," didn't you? For a laughably dense set of instructions that should have simply said, "Have a pro do it for you" (but he wouldn't have been paid for it!), we at the Antisocial Network hereby award Baptist Johnson today's Dumbass of the Day. And he doesn't even need to take the award to a professional to have it installed...

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was    ehow.com/how_8626377_convert-r12-r34.html

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DD - AUTOMOTIVE