Producing this epic took hours, days, weeks and months of reading, talking to DEX and cooling system experts and users, writing, rewriting and then starting the whole procedure over again. It has consumed more than 8 months of my life. (Yes, a lot more than it should have due to health problems.) Frankly, the difficulty was finding any one person who could factually layout the “whole” picture. I’ve not yet spoken to any single individual who is either able or willing to share it “all.”

Quick, easy and guaranteed? Can those terms all be used to describe anything that actually proves to be true? They can be if you’re talking about trying to determine if an A/C system is working at peak performance. It’s really an old trick that (surprisingly) isn’t used or understood by a lot of today’s technicians. But rest assured that once you understand it, you will use it every time. After all, it’s the laws of physics at work in your A/C system, and you just can’t fight the laws of physics.

On July 11, 2004, at the Porsche 928 Owner’s Club International Convention in Wichita, Kansas, a friend told Louie Ott that the first sign of a problem was when he spied a slight tongue of orange flames suddenly poking out from underneath the right front end of Louie’s 1987 S4. It was followed almost immediately by the whump of a hood-bending explosion, a red-orange ball of flames shooting out from under the car and clouds of smoke; lots of smoke. All this as Louie, trying to gauge his distance from a nearby fence, was very slowly backing out of a small parking area.