Having just started working on a 914, I decided to start with the electrical work last night. I managed to round up many of the needed relays/fuses/etc. from local sources and dug in.

After 3 or 4 hours, and a bunch of contact cleaner/scrubbing, I had brakelights, running lights, fog lights, head lights, and the interior light all functioning. Feeling pretty full of myself I decided to get IN to the cockpit and see what I could fix there (after all, I WAS superman at this point, right?). Foglight switch, new bulb, voila. Moving on... Cig. lighter? No problem! Cleaned the ground contact and re-seated, wooo! Defrost light? Hmm...that's weird...pull it on, nothing.

"Ok..." I think to myself. I start at the connection points on the rear window, cleaning and tracing the wiring up to the fuse panel. No problems so far! Fuse is good. Well...Ok. I'm feeling pretty brave. So I put YE OL' ARM under the dash to see if I could feel the wiring on the defrost. Switch isn't connected to anything at all. "Now we're getting somewhere!", I think to myself. Pull out the knob, unscrew the retainer, plop goes the switch.

So now, I'm at a point where I can't reach the switch because it's fallen back. "Ah crap!" A quick look at the speedometer housing, leads me to unscrewing the screws and removing. I look back and down in the direction of the defrost and what do I see?

A completely working defrost switch with with knob, bezel, etc. all together. Just sitting there. I pull the knob, it lights up, current hits the contact on the glass. WooOOOoOOOOoOOoO!

Now...I wonder what other, uh, interesting things I'm going to find? Anyone else have a previous owner mystery equally amusing at 4am?

when i bought my car it didn't have a horn.
so after driving for a week or so, i went to kragen's and got me a horn. took the haynes and looked up the wires, found them in the front trunk and hooked them up.
worked great! took the car for a test drive (of course) and while going some '75 on the freeway i use my turn-signal to indicate a lane change.
much to my surprise, the headlights were moving up/down with the rythm of the blinker!


turned out the dumb PO had hacked into the wiring and when he couldn't figure out what was wrong simply removed the horn ...
Andy

My favorite part is when people run extra wires to solve a problem. For the time it took them to run the new wire.. they could have fixed the real problem.


B

Ya, tell me that about my fuel pump wiring...

I spent 5 hours on that.... (relay board, checking buncha references.. going from one end of the car to the other checking currents... nada...Ended up running new wires!!!!

ya... I need to get a "painless" wireing kit and redo the whole car... I have that as plans...