About

What began as an afternoon in the garage to fix the leaking compressor in the M5, quickly snowballed into many overnight parts orders, lots of trips to the machine shop, and a dangerous coffee addiction to figure out how to properly (and reliably) retrofit the E28 HVAC system to R134a using a modern Sanden compressor. After many weeks of development, countless hours in AutoCAD, and a whole bunch of wasted hoses, brackets, and freon, the first prototype was ready for testing...then another one...and so on. With summer right around the corner, and a functioning system underway, the next step was adjusting the bractetry, hardware, and overall layout to match BMW's design language of the 80s. This included sourcing factory-like components from the correct metric lock nuts to the original corrugated heat shielding and building a user guide that closely followed the well known Bentley service manual.