Sunday, October 23, 2005

The trouble with wiring diagrams

Dad and I have discovered that not many know how to properly re-wire a Ghia. Part of the problem may lie in these widely-popular wiring diagrams. Don't get me wrong, they're immensely helpful. But, you have to understand some quirks such as how some of it is shown to you from the point-of-view of the driver's seat.

Therefore, the clock/fuel gauge diagram should be reversed if you're looking at it from inside the trunk. Otherwise, you may end up reversing your wires, and that's precisely what happened to my dad's Ghia when someone installed a new gas tank:



Note in that picture that the black "hot" wire is connected to the left terminal and the brown wire to the sending unit on the tank is on the right. On mine it's reversed:



Of course, I've replaced the old, brown sending unit wire with a brand new one that isn't all chewed up. Dad's fuel guage registered empty all the time until he reversed his wires to be hooked up like mine. Now, it reads accurately. Mine works, but it's not accurate.

It was far worse when I first had the Ghia, but I suspect it's still not reading quite as it should. I think the main culprit in my case is proper grounding. So, I hooked up a ground wire to the little round peg on the sending unit. The peg looks like this:



I hooked it up to a wire with a standard male terminal:



It seems better but it still jumps around a bit. Perhaps the ground isn't connected as well as it should be. I really should find some round "clip on" terminal perhaps?

Next up for troubleshooting and repair is our pair of non-functioning clocks. I have a feeling these clocks just seem to wear out over time as I've read about others having clock issues. But, hopefully one of you out there is looking at these photos and saying "Hey, you forgot to hook up X terminal to Y connection, that's why your clock's not working!"

4 Comments:

Blogger Chris Druckenmiller said...

Hey, I'm glad I checked the archives for comments! I'll look through TheSamba for info on that. I think Dad mentioned as much to me over Thanksgiving, too.

12:06 PM  
Blogger Vinod said...

This comment has been removed by the author.

10:36 PM  
Blogger Vinod said...

This comment has been removed by the author.

2:06 AM  
Blogger Vinod said...

This comment has been removed by the author.

1:10 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home