Re: Radiator Fan Motor: Was Thanks - Now Long

[Robert Houk - SMCC WorkGroup Server Firmware <Robert.Houk@East.Sun.COM>]

	   >You should put the fuse on the "+" side, as close to the power
   *source*
	   >as possible.

   I am electrically challenged.  Since I got this car I've decided to get
   edumacated.  What/where is the power source?  You mean away from or
   close to the fan motor?  I got the ground thing from another member who
   had archived it from someone else;

A later posting indicates Audi even provides a grounded fuse...fooey!

Electrically, "as far away" as possible from the power source. Nominally,
this would be "the battery"; I don't know how your car is wired. My '83
UrQ runs the fan motor from the fuse block (25A), and is quite capable
of melting the fuse block (literally! Grrr!).

Probably the "easiest" (modulo being an Audi!) would just be to "snip"
the positive lead into the fan and put a moby fuse in line; probably
want to bolt the fuse-holder to chassis (it'll probably get "warm")
on G.P.'s, which makes it tricky -- you'll hafta add extra wire. If
there's multiple positive leads into the fan (true on my '83), you'd
need to go back further "electrically" to where they source before
splitting into multiple feeds (like before the low/high speed relay),
or independently fuse all of them.

Fusing the ground wire again gets you back to a "common" point, and
may well be easier in that regard (especially if you can just adapt
the stock Audi fitment), and will still protect against a runaway fan
motor letting all the smoke out of your wiring harness, but it won't
protect you against shorting the main wiring itself (e.g., from an
accident which crunches the +12 lead against the engine block, etc.).

You should prolly get the appropriate Bently; the wiring "diagrams"
do have a lot of useful info, although they can also make it awfully
challenging to extract that info...and always take anything they
say as "a guideline, a useful starting point" to track down and
verify the actual wiring!  Fortunately, there probably won't be many
80A wires running around your harness (actually, if Audi is being
true to form, there won't be *any* 80A wires...).

I would be tempted to snip out the current wiring completely (it's
almost certainly under-gauged in typical Audiesque fashion) and in-
stall new heavy-gauge fused wiring directly from the { Alternator |
Battery } as appropriate (alt. is better, IMO, if you can arrange it),
bypassing entirely the factory wiring harness. (Do the same thing for
the headlights, via appropriate relays...but that's another topic)

Good luck!

					-RDH