Wiring Re-Visited Part One

14th April 2006
I managed to start looking at the wiring that had so far been heavily neglected due to its complexity. During the preliminary work on the car I had wired up the Alternator and starter motor loop through to the battery. I had also taken my wiring loom that I had purchased and placed the ignition coil leads and a small fuse box into the loom. This looked awful and to be honest nothing liked I thought it would. Even the fuse box although a new blade type was too small to take all of the connections. An interesting thing to pass on here is to get the largest fuse box that you can. The stock VW one is the absolute minimum needed and don't be conned by over zealous electrical companies stating 10 ways is enough.

I had downloaded wiring diagrams from http://www.vintagebus.com/wiring/ and had been pouring over the circuits during the Christmas period when it was to cold to get near the garage. I had decided that the wiring that I had in the loom was not enough to complete a wiring solution to reach the rear lights and the front lights. It seemed that the best solution for this was to go to my friendly Beetle breakers and buy two lighting wiring harnesses. These where fairly easy to extract and came with a short run of cabling for the brake switch. I also purchased a VW fuse box at the same time and decided that as this had the mountings for the relays built in that I was going to use it to rewire the car. I wired the lighting circuit in to the fuse box relatively easily. The wiring diagrams where very good as they were colour coded. I managed to buy different colours of wires that matched the wiring colours in the diagrams. This I felt would make the process easier. My helpful beetle braking friend Rob was also able to supply the connector blocks that VW used to connect multiple wires together making a neat job.

The next wiring needed was to hook up the power to my array of dials and the lighting circuits to them. This was to take a while to make them as I had to solder two wires into each spade connector and ensure a clear cover was on each before starting the next. The power wires had six connectors and a seventh to connect onto the circuit on the fuse box or the light switch. This repeated for the earths and again twice more for the instruments lights. The wiring was soon in and connected up. I had decided to stick with the VW switches as these Lent authenticity to the project build. It wasn't long before I had instrument lights working from the button.

I had kept the ignition switch wiring and was able to connect this onto the fuse box to provide a basic ignition system through the key. The rest of the front circuits to the car where connected up as described in the wiring diagram. There was a lot of little wires that linked the circuits together and soon I had front indicators, front lights and hazards all working on the front circuit.

The rear original wiring loom was still in place and as I had the front of the wiring completed I needed to strip the extra wiring out of the harness. This was simply a job of ensuring that I left the wiring colour coded wires in for the rear lights number plate, indicators, brake lights and a reversing light. The resulting bundle was re-wound with tape and laid through the cockpit on the passenger side.

I installed a stereo system in the whole that I had constructed in the dash the wiring was fairly simple and I ran a power amp wire alongside the wiring harness.

I would have to wait until I managed to buy the rear lights before I could start the wiring of the rear lights although I had enough wire to run out to the back of the car and supply the lights when eventually had them fitted. It would not know that it would be until the 11 Sep 2006 until I found some lights that would fit and would be what I wanted for my buggy.