Watch the video to see Sam finally complete the new wiring on this 1967 VW Beetle.

A while back our wiring work on this 1967 VW Beetle got stopped in its tracks because of a missing grommet that needed to be ordered. Well, the grommet is back in stock and so Sam gets back to work on the wiring. Follow along as Sam gets the main wiring harness run into the trunk, all of the wiring behind the dash, and wiring at the front of the car gets installed.

Video Transcript

So with that, we've got all new wiring up here.

I don't know how long it's been since I was actually working on the wiring. But I actually have the grommet that I need for right here. So now I can run the wiring up to the front of the car now finally.

And yeah, could I have run the grommet, or just run the wiring and then just put a small slice on the grommet and put it in there later? Yeah I could have, but why? Do it right. I had other things I could do like all the stuff on the engine, so I did them.

And fortunately I have these guys saved over from my Super Beetle where I didn't use them. And our grommet here, up on the trunk, still in decent enough usable shape. However we will spray some silicone on it.

There we go. Now up into the trunk we go.

I don't like all that twist. I ain’t Chubby Checker. That’s much better.

All right, let me pull you guys into the trunk.

So in the trunk, back behind the hood hinge is where that wiring harness comes out. Now, got all these beautiful wires. I run them back this way.

All right, one problem I have is I don't have a headlight switch. I do have an ignition switch so I can get that set in. Speedometer also, I don't know how that speedometer works or if it works. When we had our cable hooked up and we were spinning we couldn't spin the speedometer. So I've got to do some checking on that stock speedometer and see whether or not it's actually going to work or I'll have to put in a different unit. We do have the Smith's gauges which are a stock retrofit. I'm might end up putting one of those in here, but I'll have to get it on order to do so.

So let me see what I can do for a headlight switch. Ignition switch works. Fuse box works. I do have a new flasher relay. I don't think I'm even going to bother trying to use the old one. Yeah, let me grab some switches and stuff and get all this stuff taken care of.

Using a drill, an upper speedometer cable from a Super Beetle, and our speedo. And the tenths flipped over so she's got to be doing a little bit of work. Does it sound great? No, but it'll work.

Well whether by hook or by crook, I got a headlight switch. It may have come out from a car that's out in the parking lot. Okay, it did come from a car out in the parking lot, but whatever, I don't care. We got left and right rear tail lights. This is our coil. That's going down to our brakes. That's to our headlight switch. That's going to go to our ignition switch.

Since headlight switches are on back order at the moment I had to rob this from a car. I tested it. The dash rheostat doesn't work. That’s typical. But everything else does.

Power that guy up.

Terminal 50. 15 is coil.

That'll get battery from that. That'll get power from that. That'll be over there, whichever one of these is longer, will pop right there. And we'll go right there. That's our tail lights. Those will go up to our speedometer. These will go to our warm blinker which conveniently has black white and black green printed right on it. Black white, black green.

And this is just a reproduction from Wolfsburg West of the original flasher. This one's Hella. That one's Wolfsburg West, but even this one's got the nice little cool color printed thing. This might actually work, but at this point I don't feel like taking the time to have to backtrack it and rewire it. So I'm just going to start from scratch with a good one.

Might as well throw our speedometer in, right. But before I do I'm going to make sure all the bulbs work. Speedometer, turn signal, oil pressure and alternator, high beam, and just our illumination. Plus I need to get another one for… Oh, that one's got a bulb actually. Just pull that guy out and make sure that one works, but yeah.

All right well, we'll just do a little bit of this. No, apparently that screwdriver is way too big.

There, that’s one side.

Hook up the warning lights for oil pressure and our fan belt. So much wire out of my way a little bit. There we go.

Power to the headlight. Power to the starter, running lights, coil, warning lights, rear turn signals, brake light, that's all the wires on the master cylinder. And wow, I've got a nice echo off the bottom of this hood. Confirmed the speedometer does spin so we'll hook that guy back up.

Why is everything on this car just rattle? The decklid rattles. The hood rattles. This thing's probably going to make a whole bunch of noise when I'm driving it, but it's a Volkswagen. As long as it make that … noise, I'm good.

All right, I'm going to take a break on this and get to work on that. That being a 1600cc unassembled long block that we're building, or that I'm building, and I'm building poorly. But that's in our other series so watch that. Watch this. Watch everything. Have fun guys. We'll see you later.

All right, back to work on the Beetle now that the longblock’s completed. It's Tuesday October 3^rd. Fighting it cold, but while I'm here and I've got a little bit of energy I'm going to work on some more of the wiring. Get the turn signal wiring done. Headlight wiring done. Probably get the master cylinder and the horn and the all the wiring underneath the gas tank done.

Once I got all the wiring done then I can get to work on the brakes which involves replacing that master cylinder, wheel cylinders in the back, probably along with brake hoses. We'll take a look at the hardware, the shoes, the drum make sure those are all good.

But we're getting there. Probably not going to do a whole lot of narrating through this because, again, I'm dealing with a cold. And I don't want to be sitting here with a runny nose and sniffling and you guys probably don't want to hear any of that. So with that, I'm going to light up this trunk a little bit and I'm going to get to work.

All right, so now we've got our front right turn signal harness, front left turn signal harness, and our turn signal switch harness are all wired into the fuse box and to our flasher relay and to their junction box.

Also off the turn signal switch we've got our relay plugged in for our headlight relay. I have tested this relay. It does work. I still need to ground out the one ground wire for the turn signal switch. This thing was cut. So hopefully I can get a ring terminal or something on this thing and get him connected into a ground down here somewhere.

Got some of the wiring cleaned up as best as possible as far as routing and whatnot. Once the wire cover’s in place you're not going to see most of it. But either way, still try to make it look halfway decent.

All right, so now I'm going to get our left harness installed. We've got horn, master cylinder, steering column, and headlight. The only thing that actually stays up top is the headlight. The rest of the stuff goes down in there and then out in there. And then all this stuff gets hooked up up there. Starting with this guy connects to the main harness for our brake light. These guys both right here. This guy's hanging out a little bit further than I’d like. That's power to the master cylinder. And that's power to the horn. This is our high beams with our high beam indicator. This is our low beam. That's everything up top. Now we got to get all that down to there which means I need some silicone.

All those guys go down in there. And that will go out to there. But I'm going to go inside and push those wires out real quick.

So now all those wires are down here. Ground tang on the steering column. These wires will go down to our horn. And these guys will come down to our master cylinder, but since we're going to be replacing this master cylinder, I'm not going to bother hooking them up quite yet.

Unfortunately our original horn no longer goes beep, beep so we've got to replace it. And even though these won't actually really accept the boots, I'm still going to put them on because if you're going to do it, do it right.

I am going to put in some new headlight wire tubes and they’ll just keep the wires safe and protected. Feed the wires through and a little silicone spray never hurt.

Now we do have the ground wire run through here as well and we got a little screw right there. Now you can take all those wires and then it goes high, low, ground. And that will plug into the back of our headlight.

So with that, we've got the left headlight harness in place under the gas tank steering column tube wire. Master cylinder switches, these guys are just in tandem. Two wires come down, hook up to one switch. The other two wires will jump over and hook up to our other switch.

We've got two wires running down and into our horn. And then, of course, we've got the wires running through our horn wire tube and out to our headlight plug. High beam, low beam, ground is how they sit into the plug.

Now I can do the right side harness. It's a little bit easier, couple less wires.

Oh and down in here, as you can see, the horn harness exits there and runs over to our horn which is right behind the horn drill. Isn't that convenient.

All right, another way of doing the headlight wire tube wiring. If you prefer, is to just do it outside the car first. All it can do is one wire at a time. Keep your ground wire out. Somewhere like there should be fine.

This harness is really hard to figure out. We've got a low beam and a high beam. So that does it for that one. While I'm here I've got one more wire to run. And this guy grounds out on the steering column disc. Should have a tang plug in tab. Either I'm blind, which is a yes, I could have sworn I saw it the other day. Oh, there it is. It is on this side. We'll check that out. And then this wire is just going to feed straight up the steering column.

All right that does it for that. Right headlight, really difficult. Had to plug in two wires up with the fuse box. And then steering column wire attaches this tang which grounds out to the coupler, which grounds out to the steering box, which grounds out to the beam, which grounds out to the chassis, which just plain grounds out. That wire runs all the way up the center of the steering column into the car. And we'll hook that up to the ground ring on our stock steering wheel later.

And I am putting a new steering wheel in, just because that's something you have to touch regularly and we offer our own steering wheel so it makes perfect sense. Why wouldn't we? And besides, our old one was ugly and cracked and it wasn't even black or charcoal, as it should be for this 1967. So yeah, we're putting a new steering wheel on because who wants to hold on to that.

Oh and while we're at it, or while we're here rather, we do have actually the late model flasher switches, flasher knobs will fit the 67 switch. I just need to get the 12 mm escutcheon for that, which I think is a one-year only item.

We do have our wiper motor pre-wired to our new switch. Wiper motor does work. This will connect to the fuse box. And it's just a lot easier to do this out on the bench where you can see all the terminal numbers, there and there. So at which point, this could actually go in the car as well.

And speaking of wiring things at the bench, sometimes it's just a lot easier to deal with stuff at the bench then leaned over the hood of a car. Now because we do have an aftermarket relay, this terminal KBL, which would have been B1 on our original terminal, instead of B1 going to our turn signal indicator and the speedometer this terminal now goes over to our flasher switch. So blue wire will go to KBL and that's going to go to terminal K.

And honestly I can't see which one is K because mainly I just can't see. So I'll deal with that when I get my glasses.

And this wire which will go from our 49A, which is also, would have originally been off of our turn signal switch, is now going to be a separate wire off of 49A. This actually will tell you that is terminal 49A right there. So we'll use the piggyback terminal that's included. That will go to our turn signal indicator.

Got a black wire from 15, which is our coil. We've got red wire, we got a couple of red wires. I know that's going to be main power. This will be our flasher power. That's for ignition switch. That is for headlight switch, headlight switch, headlight switch, headlight switch, headlight switch. Brown ground.

So now give me a moment while I try and decipher which one of these terminals is which and then I'll get these guys hooked up to here.

All right, so I got those guys figured out. This will go to our fuse box ignition hot. This will go to our fuse box battery hot. So I'm going to going to go put all those wires in and then of course I can't forget our dome light harness, but we'll get there.

So now, we've got our dome light wired up. We have the nonswitch side with power. The switch side we can select between our door jams. Or if we wanted to run a separate ground wire that way we can turn the dome light on whenever we like. However, I didn't run another ground. I will probably just run a ground wire up inside and trying to ground it out against the body, but I'm not certain it's going to work all that way well. But we'll give it a shot anyway. Regardless, that's how the dome light switch is wired so I can snap it in place.

Anyway, as I was.

Okay with that, all the wiring in the trunk is done. I just got to mount all the switches. So, let me do all that.

This is all done. I'm gonna cap it off with a wire cover. If I can get these stupid little nuts off. Those are on there really tight.

Yeah, here we go.

I think I'm going to call it a wrap for today. It might even be a wrap for this video. Regardless of how it ends, I'm done with all the wiring up here. Am I going to have to re do it when I weld in a new section right there? I'm going to have to pull a bunch of stuff out so it doesn't get melted, damaged, or otherwise and put it all back together. Absolutely, but I ain't doing that yet.

And I want to make sure everything else in the car works so I might as well do it now. I know wiring well enough where I can just pull it out and put it back in later. It's not a big deal. I capped it off with a wire cover. I think it works.

I might even go with a trunk liner, just the original style cardboard trunk liner and see how that looks in here. I am going to try and get all the defroster hoses and those connections all hooked up, but that'll be later.

In the meantime I can get on the brakes now. Well, after I do the tail lights and the reverse lights, but we're getting close. Later guys.

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