I live just south of you, and consider AC to be an absolute necessity.  The
good news is that when the AC is working in a tintop van, it's actually
quite effective, if not a little slow to cool down a big heat box in the
dead of summer.  Not a lot of VW repair shops work on AC here in the PNW,
and folks don't feel my sense of necessity as much, so fixing these things
gets dropped from priority lists.  Add to that meters of expensive hoses
which can leak over time, and you've got lots of old vans with dead AC
systems.  I've owned my van for just shy of a decade and have never opened
up the system, yet it still works quite excellent.  I just top it up every
other summer.  For your van, I'd test to see if there's any residual
pressure in the system, and then work from there to see if the compressor
will manually turn over without telltale nasty sounds and whatnot.  After
that, it's all just standard AC maintenance stuff, not unlike any other R12
vehicle from that era.

On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 9:20 PM, Alain Thibault <alainthibault@telus.net>wrote:

> Allo
> My 86 comes with AC but the belt is not there... I presume since AC is not
> a necessity here in Vancouver BC that it was left unrepaired. Any idea if
> the AC in a Vanagon is something prone to break and not worth the expenses?
> What is the reputation of the AC system in the 1986-1991vanagons?
> Alain
> Westy 1986
>
> Sent from my iPad 2

--
Casey