On Tue, 27 Apr 2004, Andrew Fox wrote:

> The electrical problems ive seen in the vanagon have been with troublesome
> grounds, brittle plastic connectors breaking, etc.  I have seen several
> vanagons with faulty temp gauges, the big wide connector that connects the
> "electrical ribbon" to the insturment cluster has been know to provide
> poor contact and cause problems, also there is a voltage regulator
> attached to the temp gauge which has been known to fail.

Heh...funny you should mention...a couple weeks ago I spent a few hours
cleaning connections and working on the instrument cluster to fix an
erratic temperature gauge...on my Volvo 240. ;)  I still have a lot of
corrosion-related electrical gremlins to track down on that car.  Last
weekend I spent about an hour fixing all the interior lights.  They were
all just corroded, plain and simple.

Lemmee tell you, too, that car's wiring makes a Vanagon look simple. ;)

> Also, i was'nt comparing the vanagons electrical system to exotics like
> british cars, i was comparing it to other more popular cars ive owned:
> toyotas, hondas, chevy's, and ford's.

My '94 Honda had a really nice, well-thought-out electrical system.  But
it's a bit unfair to compare a car made in the mid-90s to one made in the
early 80's.  Somewhere around that time GM was experimenting with wiring
cars with solid-core aluminum wire (what a disaster!) and most car
companies were just starting to discover the useful features of
water-tight, multi-pin Molex connectors instead of the corrosion-prone
1/4" brass fast-ons that most of our Vanagons are sporting.

David Brodbeck, N8SRE
'86 Volvo 240DL wagon
'82 VW Vanagon Westfalia Diesel