The Heater Undelete

At some point a previous owner had the heater core go bad so he removed the A/C and Heater equipment under the hood and bolted a steel cover over the air inlet on the firewall. By removing this he also eliminated the Defroster. So for the last 10 years its been a little cold and foggy in the Nova during the winter months.

I decided this finally needed to be fixed. In addition to this my son also noted that there were no lights on the dash, so at night he was running dark. Since we were going to send out the seat to have it recovered I figured this would be the perfect opportunity to get under the dash and fix this as well.

First I completely disassembled the dash. How is it possible all this stuff fits under there?

Next to get access to the mounting location for the heater blower motor I removed the passenger side inner fender well from inside the engine compartment.

There are a couple of companies that make "AC Delete" covers for the 3rd Generation Novas. The top piece is made from fiberglass and looks like a factory cover but I found it wouldn't fit without cutting the cover just above the top hose outlet. So I opted for the simpler looking ABS cover.

 

The next item was the wiring the PO had snipped off the wires that passsed through the firewall and I had this to work with. See the 5 neatly cut wires? They go through the firewall out to the AC/Heater components. The other end of this harness goes to the AC/Heater controls on the dash.

 

I bought a new Blower Motor, AC Relay, and AC Resistor and from the factory service manual I figured out how to wire it. The key to success was to buy all AC components. The AC components are all heavier than the Heat-only and the firewall on the AC cars are different than the firewall on the heat only cars!

 The resistor was mounted inside the AC delete panel and wired out to the AC relay which feeds the blower motor. This all is routed through the firewall in the big grommet just above the valve cover.

You can see the new Heater core coming through the firewall. The first test was to try the blower motor and it worked on all speeds. All I need now is a couple of hoses and the Heater install will be complete.

In reassembling the dash I cleaned all of the connections and replaced all the bulbs and two undersized fuses and now we have all the lights on the dash as expected!

We added new door panels a new dash pad and had the seat recovered and the interior is like new.