thebyus

Got a 2001 XJ Sport - with original stock Sanden A/C compressor.

I was heading back from Jeep Safari in Moab a month ago, and 20 minutes out of town I start hearing a strange sound from the engine. Not terribly surprised as I had wheeled it pretty hard, and everything seems to be working fine. Finally pop the hood an hour later after a traffic light made the sound REALLY apparent, and I have black stuff blown all over the inside of the hood, the battery, the head, etc from the front of the A/C compressor. Smoke and grinding coming from the front, too, from what appears to the be clutch bearing rather than the compressor itself.

I needed to be at work the next day, so I drove it 6 more hours home. The one time I turned it off to fill up on gas, when I restarted it, it had begun to seize and threw a ton of sparks from the clutch bearing area. Next day the compressor or clutch bearing was completely seized. Evacuated the system, pulled the compressor and installed a delete pulley.

Now I have the connector for the A/C lines that connected the compressor dangling in the engine bay -

1st question -

how the hell do I cap them? (right now I have a ziplock bag over them, tied off with some e-tape to keep crap out).


2nd question.

At some point in the future, I might decide I want A/C again in this thing. All the shops I talked to said that if the compressor is what went, then the whole system is basically shot and needs to be flushed, whereas if it is just the clutch bearing that went, replacing the compressor/bearing (they look to be about the same cost) and the accumulator and it's good to go.

How do you tell if you blew the whole compressor or not?

Fred/N0AZZ

That's about all there is to the system to go wrong and I have had to replace all of those in the past on other cars and trucks.


You want to make Damn sure the system is clean before you install anything new in it. Yeah I could where you would want AC back in your XJ.