Two personal experiences related to ground issues in VWs. The first, an 81 Rabbit Diesel, the second a late 89 Jetta GLI 16V.
Once the Rabbit got to about 2 years old, I would come out every four or five days and find the battery all but dead. No one I talked to in the VW community could figure it out, the battery and charging system were checked over and over and found to be just fine. I used to read the old Sports Car Graphic magazine (shows my age, doesn't it??) and in one of the issues there was a letter titled "Groundless Rabbit." A young lady from somewhere in California had this problem and had it solved by a garage that specialized in air cooled Beetles. He ran a 6 or 8 gauge piece of wire from a bolt on the alternator bracket over to the negative terminal on the battery. I tried it and it worked, never another problem. Despite the majority of my future VWs being other than Rabbits, I have continued the practice. On the Jetta, we had had it for about a year, still under warranty, when it started running erratic as hell, especially under heavy acceleration. Several visits to my local VW dealer had them mystified. Finally the shop foreman got involved and found that some of the grounds from in the rain tray to the cylinder head were fraying badly at the connectors. A couple of the ones on our car only had two or three strands left connected - not good for ground continuity. He spliced in a couple pieces of new wire and the problem went away but not for long, there were others that were also affected. At the end of the day, in my shed I found some braided cable from some previous project and built two new ground straps, each one much longer than the existing ground wires. A visit to the local hardware store provided some brass lugs normally used in household electrical repairs and fabricated the new ones, soldering them and covering them with shrink tubing. We figured out that when the car was designed and all the wiring specs were laid out in front of the "bean counters" they decided that if they shortened each of the wires by a half inch, they could save a lot of money in copper wire, hence increase the profitability of the car. What they evidently didn't think of was that as the car builds mileage, the engine mountings are going to wear and the engine will rock forward and backward more than when brand new. With the shortened wires this extra rocking would then start to strain them leading to the strands breaking and the ground issues. Bundling all the grounds in the rain tray into a large butt connector with a large gauge lead going to the coil bracket bolt and the new ground to the cylinder head from the other side of that coil bracket bolt solved all the problems we have ever had. Just my 2ยข worth..........Jack On 25 Sep 2011, at 11:39, Chad Rebuck wrote: Also, wonder if the temp sender is more affected by a difference in grounding than anything else. _______________________________________________ a2-16v-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.a2-16v.com/mailman/listinfo/a2-16v-list
