Date:         Mon, 2 Sep 2002 08:56:11 -0700
Reply-To:     Tom Scott <tscott@EDNET.NET>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         Tom Scott <tscott@EDNET.NET>
Subject:      Alt and OXS Lites On
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-Ascii"

Hello,
I'm a new Vanagon owner (bought an 84 Westy w/210K miles and a rebuilt engine "sometime in the last 60K miles").  I'm having a great time fixing things and have searched the archives for clues more a than a few times and would like to give back the following:

I had the "Alt and OXS Lights flicker on and off at certain revs" problem. Per many hints in the archives I looked in turn at:
1) Slipping Alt belt (no slip, but put belt dressing on to stop squeaks)
2) Not enough Alternator output (Plenty there, whew, didn't want to re-build the Alt yet)
3) Bad ground connection in the Dash (all good but I did find why all my dash lites were out, but more about that later)
4) Bad blue wire from the alt to the dash (Geronimo! found a melted spot where the wire had touched the manifold sometime in the past.. put some sleeving over it but the problem persisted... Murphy's law or more than one problem... Hmmm)
5) Bad brushes in the alternator (pulled out the regulator/brush assembly from the back of the alternator; got a big spark when my wrench touched that big bolt on the alternator with the two big red wires!  That's why they tell you to pull off the basttery ground connection EVERY TIME you work on an electrical problem.  Thank goodness no harm done.  But the brushes look fine, lots of meat there and good spring action.)
6) The refridgerator relay under the driver's seat (Again Murphy-Geronimo!  Relay very loose, maybe bad ground? Screwed down tight, problem still persists... darn)
7) I finally got around to re-crimping the push-on connector on the end of the blue wire that goes to the D+ terminal on the generator.  Lo and behold the problem went away for a whole day... and then came back.  I knew I was close.  Examined the crimped-on-blue-wire-connector and determined that there was enough sideways play in the D+ terminal that it could just touch the alternator chassis! So I took a piece of sleeving about 3/8 inch diameter and 1/2 inch long and slipped it over the connector to keep it from touching the alternator frame and the problem has not re surfaced since!!!

Oh and the dashboard lights dead?  I found every one of the grey-with-blue-stripe wires for the dash lights had completely melted and were completely useless, completely corroded, so this must have happened years ago.  The VW wiring scheme had them daisy-chained from one to the next and apparently one of the last in the chain shorted to the dashboard frame and there's no fuse to interrupt it.  The circuit is fed from the bottom terminal of the headlight switch where the dimmer resides.  Fortunately the wire went before the dimmer melted.  I think the offender was the light behind the plastic heater control panel that slipped out of it's housing and slipped back to touch the metal dash frame.  I ran new wires separately to each lamp, bunched them together, and fed them from a 1/2 Amp fuse in turn fed by a new wire from the headlight switch socket.  Lights again! and with a fuse that will blow instead of smoked wires!

Thanks to all who contributed to, and who maintain the archives.  They enabled me to get a handle on things that would have been very difficult if I had to try to puzzle with only Bentley's obscure hints as a guide.

TS