Wednesday 26 February 2020

Under dash wiring completed 1500 'S'

I was fitting up the door cards and arm rest to the drivers door tonight and once that was completed (photo's soon), I stuck my head under the dash to see where I was at there with any outstanding work.
I then remembered that I was 1 x short grey wire and 1 x 4 wire joiner short in completing the fuse box connections. This just happened to be my lucky day though as I had just found a box of miscellaneous VW parts in a box in the garage which contained those 2 x items on the weekend just gone.
A quick clean of the original wire and joiner and within minutes I had completed the wiring as per the original 1964 1500 'S' wiring diagram.


All original fuse box (wet blasted), cover, headlight relay, flasher relay, hoses, wire joiners. I have made a couple of small modifications to the car though in order to future proof it (3 x extra wires to the engine bay area for tach, oil pressure & oil temp if I install any of those). These 3 x wires are well hidden inside the left rear fender and up above the fuse box area for now.

I also added an inline fuse to the black wire heading to the coil from the fuse box as this circuit is not fused from the factory which seems dumb to me as it can fry the loom out if there is a short anywhere between the coil and the fuse box.


As you can see, there are no fuses installed yet - this is to happen soon as I test each circuit.
Assuming all is okay, there is nothing further to do to the wiring on the car.


The NOS Blaupunkt speaker is installed with the wiring sitting there along with the NOS Hirschmann antenna plug ready for when the car gets a restored radio that is correct for the car (I have one but it's 1966 and thus slightly too new for the car).

The wiring has been a reasonable exercise and not overly difficult to get back to original. I 100% avoided cable ties in this car's build along with powder coating of any items, zero stainless steel fasteners unless original to the car and zero plastic electrical crimps.

The extra wires ran to the rear of the car were taped to the new colour correct loom (as you would have done back in the day) to also avoid cable ties which are just nasty on original cars. I also am not a fan of heat shrink on restored cars unless there is a very good reason for it and in this case I have only added a small piece to the horn wires up front in order to seal out moisture and dirt.

Thanks again to Mike in the UK for having the correct wiring loom remade for the car. I think it's one of the key ingredients to any car to have the wiring loom and electrical system as correct as you can get it on a restored car.

Isotropic rem polishing