First came the indicators. UK law requires us to have amber turn signals. Whilst this wasn't necessarily a problem on the Ghia, it also uses the amber lights as side lights. This is not permitted in the UK as we must have white lights showing to the front.
I removed both indicators from the front of the car, cleaned up the chrome housings, cleaned up the terminals, fitted new lamps and new gaskets. I disconnected the side light feed from the indicator housing and rewired it up into the headlight housing before refitting the indicators. I then moved on to the hazard light switch. This was removed, stripped and cleaned. Finally I moved in to the car and removed the indicator switch from the steering column. It was clearly broken but luckily I managed to find a replacement for £4.00 at the Cornwall VW owners club jamboree at Stithians.
OK so it may not be the correct year switch for the car but money was tight and we wanted to get her on the road. At least now she has working indicators!
After the indicators, I moved my attention to the head lights and side lights. As I have just mentioned, the Ghia originally used its amber turn signals as side lights. I disconnected them and rewired them into the head light buckets.
The head lights fitted to the Ghia were Wagner sealed units. One was a halogen unit and the other was a simple sealed unit. Both were American spec. Whilst searching around, my local motor factor was able to supply me with direct replacement units. Unfortunately these were not halogen units but they will help to enable the car to pass its MOT.
The units supplied were 7 inch, 60 watt/45 watt units. Again Wagner units but boxed and branded as Ring model R7014. Total cost £19.00
These new units had a small circular section of the reflective coating removed just under the filament as an aperture for the front sidelight. I had to source a new lamp holder complete with a rear mount sidelight holder.
I found www.autosparks.co.uk to be very helpful. Good prices and their customer service was fabulous.
When I looked into rewiring the front sidelights from the indicator to the headlight, I found that the feed for the sidelight had been wired directly from the fuse to a ground connection in the back of the drivers' side headlight! luckily the ground was badly corroded and not making a contact, otherwise it would have been blowing fuses for a past time.
On testing the lights, the dipper relay was not working correctly. I removed this, cleaned up all the contacts and made a slight internal adjustment. I basically had to bend one of the internal contacts slightly to allow for correct switching from high to low beam and vice versa.
Headlights and sidelights working!
The rear lights, as with most of the other electrical items, were not working mainly due to dirty connections. The brake lights were not working because the brake light feed wire was not even connected.
The Black wire is the feed from the fuse. This had been tucked down into the sheathing. The red wire that has been cut should be going to the brake warning light on the dash and the black/red cable is the wire that goes to the brake lights at the rear.
Before I connected any of this back up I decided to clean the rear lamp holders and get some new lenses with amber sections for the indicators, again for the MOT. As you can see from the pictures they were quite dirty and not very shiny or reflective.
No wonder these were not working. Badly corroded terminals offered high resistance.
A lot of the reflective coating has worn off these housings. Time for some cleaning.
It soon became apparent that these housings were not going to clean up without some drastic action. In the end I decided to use some high build white primer and some chrome spray. Time will tell how they work out.
Looking much better.
With lamps installed.
Lamps on! And yes, for you purists out there, the lamps shown are for operational purposes only. The tail and the indicator lamp are reversed.
I then set about testing the operation of the brake switch and the associated wires with a multi meter. When I connected the multi meter between the black feed and the back/red switch line, I found it to be open circuit until the brake pedal was pushed, when it then became closed circuit. This is how it should be. However, during the testing, I had disconnected the black/red cable from the connector shown in the top right of the first picture to make it easier to test. When I connected the black wire to the appropriate fuse, I was getting a constant 11 volt output on the black/red cable, irrespective of whether the brake pedal was being pushed or not. This is not how it should be. It had me stumped for a while and I even posted on a forum asking for someone to explain what was going on. Funny thing was, when I reconnected the black/red cable to the connector feeding the rear brake lights, the 11 volts dropped to nothing and the brake lights works as they should! The general consensus was that dirt must have caused a slight leakage path at the switch causing the voltage to show but when the wire was connected as it should be, the resistance of this path became too great and so the voltage dropped off. Weird but its working....
Finally, I had to replace the rear lenses with new UK spec versions with amber indicators. Here in the UK the parts seemed very expensive, around £40.00 a lens. I sourced the new items in the States for £16.00 each so I ordered these along with new seals and a few other items just to bulk out the order a little.
As with most things in life, you get what you pay for and I have to admit that I was very disappointed with the quality of the reproduction lenses. They were made in China out of what seems to be the thinnest plastic available and the lovely chrome surround has been replaced with tacky silver plastic. I should have checked exactly what I was getting for my money. Oh well, lesson learned.