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My first real upgrade project for the beetle is to create a panel to the left side of the speedometer that has a voltmeter and ammeter for the electrical system. This will help bootstrap up to doing other electrical stuff. I started working on this panel the day we had people over to watch the Indianapolis 500 race.
Here's the back of the panel; I finished soldering tonight:
The power wires are on the lower and right side of the photo. The wiring convention in the beetle is that ground wires are brown, so I followed that. The wire with the in-line fuse brings in power. The other red wire is to power something else with the same switch that turns on and off the meters (GPS, maybe?). The wires in the the upper left of the photo are the sense wires that connect from the tap connections from the shunt. The wires with one connector each are the current sense wires. The one with the double connector is the voltage sense wire; I will connect it to whichever end of the shunt has the higher voltage.
After soldering everything together, here's a final hot test of the meters before I start installing things permanently in the car:
This is taken inside the luggage compartment where the wiring is. Notice the hole in the instrument panel to the right of the photo where the panel has been removed.
I made an enclosure for the shunt from a "project box" from Radio Shack. It should keep the shunt isolated from the car body. The heavy wires carry the current and the skinny wires are the tap that runs to the panel where the meter is.
By the way, after a second round of adjustments to the brakes, they're working very very well. On the first out-of-walking-distance drive, I noticed the steering wandering a bit. Not necessarily new, I just wanted to check it out. Well, there's a bushing in the steering system in the front end that I've ordered a replacement for. So I'm doing less driving until that comes, probably the middle of next week, and thus I'm working on system-level stuff.