VW interior light mystery!

Hello!!

I'm looking for some help putting my '69 type 1 back together. I am cracking on with the wiring but am hitting a couple f snags. The first is the interior light fitting. this does not work and has never worked. However I cannot trace the wiring for the light. I thought it folloed down the back of the door pillar to run to the wiring loom along the chassis but its not there! Then I thought it may traverse through the headlining but no luck there either. The car is a standard so does not have sprung door switches for the interior light. -Any ideas?

The second mystery is a light on the outside of the passenger side of the car at the top of the door pillar directly below the rain gutter. The car had this light on it when i bought it but it has never worked. It has a coloured lense red at the back and clear at the front which makes me think it would be switched with the headlights. When the car went off to get resprayed the garage took this light off and again i can't find the wiring for it so any ideas where the wiring goes here too would be helpful!

Thanks

Angus

Reply to
roberts.angus
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Interior light wire should go down thru the "A" pillar and out to the boot area. Pull on the wire and have a mate look for it move.

No idea about the exterior light. Custom one-off?

Speedy Jim

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Reply to
Speedy Jim

Dear Angus,

No mystery. The interior light on the sedan should have TWO wires connected. One is hot, the other's not.

Both run over the top of the front door THEN down the A-pillar. The hot wire angles over to the fuse block. The ground wire continues down past the door hinges where it connects to the ice-box switch (ie, up is on). You'll see a second wire connected to the switch. It runs back up to the boot area, across it, then down to the second switch on the pax-side door.

Figure out which wire is which before doing anything. Then DISCONNECT THE BATTERY before pulling any wires.

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The interior light on the sedan is part of the trick to running a really neat looking instrument cluster, in that you need to fish wires from the engine compartment to the dash. The best way to do that is through the overhead channel -- the same place Volkswagen runs their wires.

At the rear of the body the overhead channel is blocked with a lump of urethane foam. You'll need to punch through it with your fish-tape (when installing instruments, etc). (1964 & earlier sedans stuffed the channel with a bag of horsehair (!) Easy to fish out, which you should do if you've got an old bug. The horsehair promotes rust.)

You only run the fish-tape up to the door-pillar, where you pull the interior light fixture, reach in and hook your messenger to the fish tape. Now you can pull the messenger wire/cable/whatever through to the engine compartment. The tricky bit is that you don't need the fish- tape to work FORWARD of the door pillar... since you already have the leads to the interior light. Simply tie your messenger to one of the leads and pull it through to the boot. Now you can pull wire, tubing or whatever else you might need, from the engine compartment to the boot.

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I've no idea as to the purpose nor wiring of the passenger-side fixture you described.

-Bob Hoover

Reply to
Veeduber

Reply to
John

I'll second John's guess. I've had a number of older Porsches and all of them had "alley lights." IIRC, you were allowed to park in very narrow German streets after certain hours with half of the car on the sidewalk, the other half on the street as long as you had these lights on. To get it working, you'd turn on the left turn indicator (key on) and then (with left signals flashing) turn the ignition off with the left indicator still engaged. This would turn on the alley lights, which were front/rear side parking lights, but very dim with a greatly reduced current draw. This 69 VW might have had this added for some reason (possible European delivery of US spec car?) Anyone's guess. Bill.

Reply to
Bill

It sounds like a handlebar end turn signal for a European motorcycle. Usually found on old Beemers.

T> If it was a lot older you would be thinking it was one of those "upgrades"

Reply to
Anthony W

Methinks those were amber and clear. At least mine were. ('66 R69US)

Reply to
<jjs>

Show us a picture!

Reply to
vwluvrs

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