Date: Sat, 25 Jan 2014 12:40:33 -0500
Reply-To: Derek Drew <derekdrew@DEREKMAIL.COM>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: Derek Drew <derekdrew@DEREKMAIL.COM>
Subject: About VW Electrical Terminals and Connectors
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This is a cross post of something I just put onto Samba after
somebody was posting about terminals.
The posts I made were about the VW terminals, my favorite VW terminal
crimpers from Wurth (055810 or tool number 055813) , and about
terminals in general,
here: http://www.thesamba.com/vw/forum/viewtopic.php?t=410934&start=380
------------------------------------
The mother of all Terminal pages (for us) to consult is Richard
Atwell's, and as of right now, the page is here:
http://www.ratwell.com/technical/Terminals.html Hopefully it will
still be there a good 20 years from now when you are reading
this. What he says, and what I have found to be sometimes true, is
that the best place to buy some of the VW terminals is at Digikey and
its brothers and sisters (Newark, Mouser, etc.) that sell Tyco parts
(the manufacturer of many of the terminals). You can also find many
of the terminals at Wurth and my guess is that Wurth may be better at
doing smaller orders and also many terminals that are not available
on Digikey or the big sites. Atwell identifies some of the terminals
that require many hundreds of terminals / connectors as a minimum
order, and for those especially, I would try the Wurth connectors.
What is frustrating is that the Wurth connectors are not easily
indexed to the VW part numbers, and VW was not always that great
about identifying the part numbers of its connectors in the first place.
In any case, the Wurth connector catalog is really great, but for
some reason, it took me years to figure out how to find some of the
terminals on there. So as a convenience to you, I am reproducing in
this email/post a lot of the terminal information that I have so it
is in one place.
You can see a sample of what the Wurth pages looks like below, but
that is only one screen shot to give you an idea what the page looks
like. You would want to load the actual DOC document to show the
connectors because the document is about 10 pages long. Moreover, you
will want to be able to select just the part numbers if you are going
to try to order anything from Wurth, and the part numbers will only
copy and paste out of text, not the image below. I am not exactly
shure how to force Wurth to show you the terminals with the clarity
that they are reproduced with in this file.
I have put the document online in a Google Drive folder where you can
grab it. To get the document, you might have to be logged in to
Google with a google account, or maybe you don't, I don't really
know. You might also have to be using Google's Chrome web
browser. If you are reading this, really, you should have a Google
account anyway. I tested it and it seems that you can load the
document from here regardless of how you load it:
https://googledrive.com/host/0B8sxgRMrur9XM2tCRDJUZDVZcUU/About_VW_Electrical_Terminals.doc
If that doesn't work very well, maybe you could get somewhere with
this link:
https://drive.google.com/a/derekmail.com/?tab=Xo#folders/0B8sxgRMrur9XM2tCRDJUZDVZcUU
which includes a few other unrelated files.
You can make guesses at the VW part numbers by looking at the VW
electrical parts microfiche or in ETKA (EKTA) if you go to the
electrical parts section. Unfortunately, VW has chosen to
discontinue many of the connectors themselves and instead these days
sells most of them only as connected to *wire*! That makes them
prohibitively expensive to buy from VW. There is also a Tech Talk
(Tek Talk?) and VW Service Circular issued in about 1989 or so to the
dealers about the terminals that would be interesting for me to post someday.
_______________________________________________
Derek Drew
Washington DC / New York
derekdrew@derekmail.com
Email is best normally but...
PHONE: 202-966-7907 (Call the number at left normally)
(alt/cell for diligent calling only): 703-408-1532
