Tech article by Jon Hanna (Admin)

Tired of scraping ice from the inside of my windshield in the winter, I set out to come up with a better way to heat my Bronco. Granted sealing up all the air leaks goes a long way towards making the factory heater perform the way it was designed, but I have a tendency to overbuild everything. I also wanted the option of leaving the soft top on during parts of the snowy season. The obvious answer was to let more engine heat into the cab.

The space right under the passengers seat proved to be a great place for a second heater. I spliced the factory heater hose just before the original heater and ran the coolant through soldered copper tubing (wrapped w/ 3/4″ heater hose for insulation) under the passengers floor pan and up through the vertical shelf under the passengers seat. Then I ran standard heater hose to a homemade heater. This basically consists of the cheapest heater core I could find at a local parts store and the metal plenum off an early Mustang. I actually used a Bronco blower motor because that was all I had on hand. The Mustang motor would have worked with a lot less modification and cutting, but I do now have the bonus side affect of having a spare heater motor. To switch the new heater I simply mounted an extra Bronco heater switch in the dash next to all the others.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 8th, 2009 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Interior. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.