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I have some long-term work going on with the transmission linkage in my beetle
but I'm waiting for some parts at the moment, so I can't drive it, but I can't work on the shifter either. So I'm working on one of the very long list of electrical nits that need to be fixed. The brake warning light never has worked in the car. The light is at the top center of the dash board, which means that it's totaly impossible to get at the back of the light because it's obstructed by the combination of the radio and the windshield wiper motor.
So lacking anything constructive to do with the car, I'm try to get at that light, so that I can test it directly and check its connections. I got the wiper assembly loose, but it won't quite come out; the radio is blocking it. Here's the situation:
This photo is taken leaning over the right fender, looking at roughly the center of the dash board at the back of the luggage compartment. On the left is the glove box. Down at the right the gold thing is the outside part of the fuel level sensor which is in the top of the fuel tank. Most of the wiring is off the picture to the right. At the top center of the photo the grey cylinder is the wiper motor. Right below the wiper motor is the radio, which keeps the wiper motor from being removed. So I need to de-wire it and take it out.
I stopped there this evening, because it seems that the radio is spliced in:
Although--it occurec to me that maybe the beetles radios were spliced in by stock, rather than having connectors like the rest of the electrical system? Given that every other blessed connection in the car has a spade terminal, I would very much have thought that stock radios would have them too...but there's no reference to the radio in the wiring diagrams that I can see. So maybe the official installation method involved cutting wires.
So the next time I work on it, I need to document where those wires go and what they connect to, and only THEN take the radio out.