Was installing my fog light switch tonight when I started coming across melted wires. 30 minutes later and I've traced the red power wire from the main fuses to the headlight switch to the green w/black tracer wire to the headlight motors.

All that length of wiring in the cabin is just about bare so I'm running a new wire the whole length.

Anyway, back to the question, anyone know what gauge wire I should run?

Guess that's one reason why my headlight motors are intermittent....

Depends on which green/black wire. Headlight switch to left headlight motor is 18 gage, between the motors is 24 gage according to the '74 schematic, doing the wire size conversion.

If you are running new, use 16ga wire. It is an upgrade from the factory "almost too small" wire.

I would do alot of poking around on the wiring harness before you start replacing wires, Normally when 1 wire melts in the twisted harness it melts through every other wire, I had a car with some weird electrical issues, Harness was melted from fuse panel to rear relay board. Use a multimeter, when random wires are shorted to eachother its bad.

Yeah was looking as I peeled and found some suspects. Sun was setting so I couldn't go through it as closely as I would like. The worst wire was between the fuse panel and the switch. Wonder if the DAPO had a fuse that was too high in the panel at some point?

Also of interest, my yellow car has orange dash metal....

Nothing rare, quite typical - all 914s have that condition.

I would be interested to know your thoughts on upsizing like that Mike. Why the need? Larger wire would be beneficial electrically, no doubt. Do you think the wires were undersized to begin with? The only time I have seen issues is when owners put big loads like 100W headlights through the stock wiring, something the stock wiring was never intended to handle. If the new wire gets too much larger (physically), then wire terminals don't fit and if a group of wires are dramatically upsized, then they don't fit through grommets, connectors holes in the chassis, etc. All the wiring components in a harness are engineered and sized as a system.