RE: More Voltage, Igor, More Voltage!

[Stulen James <JSTULEN@dcm.dofasco.ca>]

|Having just (more or less) finished a substantial wire revamping in
|my UrQ, I thought I'd share the results with ya.
|
|Symptom: Headlights only get 9.63 volts.
|
|Diagnosis: Audi wiring sucks.
|
|Cure: Do it myself.
|
|
| Stuff deleted...
|
|Step four was to install a relay to switch the highbeams. I got cute
|and did all this from inside the car, on the main fuse/relay panel. Since
|there were some unused relay sockets, I snarfed the left-most one (which
|has something to do with an optional oil pressure controller (or somesuch
|gobbledygook; it's not real clear from the Bently...or the Audi docs).
|periment) that WORK, and the engine idles better too!
|
|                                        -RDH

I went one better.  On my 87 Golf GTI I installed auxillary high-beams 
(Hella 160) and clear fog lamps (Hella ???).  I intended to use 100w bulbs 
in the aux high beams so I wired it strong.  I used a small addon fuse box I 
got out of a Rabbit, wired it right to the battery+ with about 1 ft of very 
heavy wire (#8 ?) .  On it are one 25A relay, for the fogs (55w+55w) and one 
40A relay, for the aux hbs, each with it's own fuse.  The whole thing is 
enclosed in a heavy duty plastic back.
Here's a neat trick some of you may want to use.  I didn't want to have the 
fog lights on when the high beams are on, and I wanted them to go off and on 
automatically when the high beams go on and off.  So, the relay for the fogs 
is powered by a switch on the dash, but the ground for the relay is connect 
to the power for the high beams (right at the high beam relay, 1 inch away, 
convenient that).  The power for the high beam relay I spliced to the 
existing high beam power, and the ground to ground.  Now, the fogs relay 
power (100ma, I think) goes through the aux hbs to ground, no big deal, but 
when you turn the high beams on this goes to 12v so the relay goes off, as 
do the fogs.  I suppose the one downside to this is if both aux hb bulbs 
blew, the fogs wouldn't work, at that would be really confusing, but I don't 
think that will ever happen.  My original point, though, was that I powered 
the aux hbs and fogs right from the battery+ (through a fuse and relay) 
avoiding the extra 10 ft of wire to go to the fuse box and back again.
As (another) aside, I removed the 100w blubs from he hbs after a while 
because I don't need *that* much light (it is nice), more so, because I had 
to shut them off for on coming traffic long before I required the on coming 
traffic to lower their beams.

James