A/C work isn't hard after you've done it awhile, it's just the begining learning curve is a little hard. Theory is all great and what not but you need experience to tell you what to do if you have a problem. I thought after taking the class at the college and going through Honda's factory training I knew how to fix A/C systems good. I was WRONG.
It took a good two summers to really get it down to a profitable every day science without asking for help. I still see guys coming into the dealer who have an A/C license and claim to be a good A/C tech and have one or two cars a summer totally stump them. You have to really pay attention to the details of what the system's doing and work in a shop with decent equipment.

You know what you should do, find a community college and sign up for an auto A/C class near you. You could do the conversion on your car in class and get credit for it.
You can learn first hand instead of paying someone to do it for you. That's why I started working on cars in the first place.

 

It's the electricial systems that stump me...have you ever tried to fix a mercedes electrical problem? Mitchell has like 80 pages of pulling out this, testing that, pulling a fuse here, tapping into there, jumping here...oh god, it was so bad, even my teacher waved the white flag on that one. It would have taken at least half a day to run through all the tests.

 

I work on Hondas for reasons like that. Honda has the best wiring diagrams in my opinion. They're training on electrical is pretty good. Much better than at ARC. They teach you how to break down and split circuits, basically how to test things on the car in the easiest and most time saving ways. It's pretty cool the stuff they teach.

 

I have found the R12 sticker near the strut mount. I will be converting it to R134 with the fitting adapters. I will also change the dryer. Anything else?

 

With a used compressor, do you know whether it came from an R-12 system? If so, see if you can drain out as much oil as possible. The oil in a conversion kit is supposed to be compatible with the oil from the R-12 system. But it'll work even better if you can remove as much of the old oil as possible.

 

I've already mounted it on the car pps: and have no idea if it was R12 or R134. Is there a type of device or hose that can be used? Geez, the two seals for the compressor were $10 from the stealership.

 

I wish I'd said something about that way up top of the thread (sorry), but I really don't know how much difference it'll make. (If I just glance at a thread, sometimes I don't really see everything.) You said it was a used compressor; did you pull it yourself at a junkyard, or one of those places where it's already taken off the car?

Was oil sorta pouring out as you handled the compressor? If not, then maybe you're OK.

 

Sorry Jim, I didn't mention the installation of the compressor in this thread because it was actually put on last month when I had to put the car in the shop for the water pump to be replaced (which they didn't replace when they did the timing belt as requested). I got the compressor off of eBay for $15, it came off of a late Prelude and was a perfect match (shop didn't charge me extra labor to put it on during the water pump job so I said go ahead). The shipper (seller) had it wrapped and sealed very well, no oil has or was leaking out of it at all.

 

How new of a Prelude? Honda was using R-134a probably by '93 or '94 .

I'm gonna GUESS that it was probably drained pretty good for shipping. Otherwise the package would have been a mess??

But now I'm gettin in over my head... I know there's some A/C techs around here, I hope somebody can help. There's 3 types of oil, I'm probably confused about which is which:
Mineral oil from older R-12 systems.
PAG oil, compatible with mineral, comes in R-134a conversion kits.
Ester oil, for systems that have ALWAYS had R-134a.
Problem is, I don't know whether PAG & ester oils are compatible with each other.

 

From just working on Hondas, we use PAG for R134a and Mineral oil for R12. I'm thinking that easter is mineral oil but I could be wrong. As long as you drain out most of the mineral oil and replace it with the same amount of PAG in the compressor you should be Okay. I would drain as much oil out of the system as possible and replace it with PAG, then recharge it with R134a.