Solder your electrical connections! (kinda long)

["Bradley Peet" <btpeet@effervescent.com>]

Is your car is over 12 years old and has a bit of oxidation/corrosion in the
engine compartment wiring, like mine?  Well, I have a suggestion for those
of you who want to improve the performance of your electrical system -- the
charging and power distribution in particular -- without spending wads of
cash on a bunch of new "monster" style cables.

In addition to cleaning the electrical contacts thoroughly, try soldering
the wire to the blade or ring connector.  Soldered connections will have
extremely low resistance that and will NOT corrode or degrade for a long,
long time.

The theory is that the stock wiring is actually pretty decent and need not
be ripped out or replaced with gonzo-gorillia 4 gauge wire.  So, how do you
test or validate this theory?  Easy.  Get a digital voltmeter and make some
measurements.  For starters, turn your headlights and accessories on and
measure the voltage drop from the output of the alternator to the positive
battery terminal.  To do this, you set the volt meter to a low scale (3V on
mine) and attach the leads to each terminal -- one lead at the alternator,
one lead at the positive battery terminal.  (In this case, you do NOT want
to reference to ground by attaching the black lead to the negative battery
terminal, making two measurements and subtracting the difference.  In this
way, you avoid measuring Voltage drops in the ground loop and there's no
math to do.)

I had around a .25 Volt drop before cleaning and soldering the connections
and have about .06 Volt drop after.  I was also losing well over a half a
volt on the positive feeds from the battery into the fuse panel, resulting
in some really low readings on the VDO Voltmeter in my center console.
Needless to say, the VDO meter inside the car is reading higher than ever
now, maintaining over 12.5 Volts even with all the accessories cranked up
and a rather meager 13.7 Volts out of the alternator.  Of course, the
voltage reading inside the car will be even better once the low beams are
relayed and that current isn't loading the wiring to/from the fuse panel.
And I'm probably not done checking connections and soldering yet.

PLEASE NOTE:  You will need a lot of solder and a LOT of heat to solder old,
heavy gauge wiring!  You can't solder the positive battery cable with a 25W
soldering pen from Radio Shack!  Rather, you'll need a 100 Watt soldering
gun or a propane torch on a VERY low setting, which is what I used.  You'll
need good solder with a lot of flux (a brown resin that allows the solder to
flow and "stick" to the wire) if your wires are old, corroded or dingy
looking.  Wire brush everything first, then heat the part you want to solder
until you can touch the solder to it and the solder melts.  If the metal
isn't hot enough, the solder won't flow and won't stick.  The trick is not
to cook the plastic insulation on the wire, although the factory wire has
pretty good quality insulation.

By the way, if you are hell-bent on getting new wires for everything (which
is certainly not a bad idea if you have the time and money), be sure to
solder the ends!  Don't forget to use heat-shrink tubing on the ends of the
wire for additional protection.  Otherwise, you might have the same sorry
situation in a few years down the road with corroded wires and lots of
voltage drops.  It doesn't take very long for your connections to degrade if
you live in a wet climate or the "rust belt" where they salt the roads.

For some odd reason, no VW I've ever owned puts out even 14V at the
alternator, so my plan is to get an adjustable voltage regulator so I can
dial in 14.4V (at idle without much load).

Hope all this helps somebody out there.

Bradley
'86 S16V 2.0l
http://effervescent.com/vw/



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