Thanks for checking that. I think I am going to have to try and trace my black wire back and see what it is connected too. It is definitely the original wire. I can’t think what else it could be apart from an earth
Earth on VW is more commonly brown tbh. So it could easily be a cranking switched supply to something cold start related.
Have you got some sort of automatic choke set up with your mod to carbs? In the very first post you wrote that you sat nursing the carbs til she would idle, has it always needed that? And in that first photo of starter wiring the other thick cable in addition to the battery one you have labelled is to the alternator.
There is no choke on the carbs, purely mechanical apart from the tps for the ignition ecu. I don’t know if there is any cold start type thing with the dta ecu that could be provided by that black wire. I am running edis ignition. The first photo is not mine but one I pinched from another thread. It shows how I have wired the new starter tho obviously with a single black wire. The second pic is my old starter setup.
Got you, yeah track down where the black wire goes to. Although, I’d still start at the fuse box and see what happened in there first..
Managed to get a look at the fusebox this morning. From what I can tell the black wire runs back to the bulkhead where it is joined to a pink/purple stripe wire. This pink wire was obviously connected to something up there originally, maybe coil? It runs to to the fuse box and can be seen circled in green. It looks like the whole wire has lost it’s insulation through heat.
your car originally had points ignition. the white/purple wire is the power feed to the coil, and is a resistance wire to reduce the voltage to what the points coil needs. the black wire from the starter is also connected to the coil live and is there to provide voltage boost to the coil on cranking. you dont need either of these wires for the new ignition system, but now you've melted the old resistance wire ideally you should remove the engine loom entirely and strip it back, as it may have damaged other wires in the harness when it melted
if you put it on the solenoid stud that should be fine, but if you earthed it like you suspected then that would cause it to melt
With one end bolted to solenoid, somewhere along the length of the wire it must have found a short to earth. The missing link is why didn’t it do this before with the old starter that had the black wire connected up the same way? Only thing I think is that on the old starter the terminal on the solenoid that the black wire was previously connected to had a fault and it didn’t go live when cranking. Along comes new starter and hey-presto it goes live on cranking and you’ve got this problem. I had it years ago on an 8v that would be a hard start from cold. Tracked it down to no live on black wire while cranking. Changed the solenoid and that fixed it. You could check your old starter on the bench and see if that post does go live or not while turning/cranking. Does that make sense?
That make’s perfect sense thank you. Unfortunately I don’t have the facilities to test the starter, as I don’t have a bench or vice, the garage only just fits the car in! I am going to go through the loom in question and check for damage.
Definitely. That’s a must as it’s unlikely that the wire that burnt up wasn’t contacting and therefore melted insulation on adjacent wires in the loom. Pain in the arse but it’s insurance.
Apart from checking the loom - check vehicle/dash functions one by one after your removals/repairs. I had an Opel Kadett 1.3 SR light switch short on me - thought I repared everything, went to turn the demister fan on and.....................my wipers started working!
Stripped some of the sheathing off the loom to see the damage: Looks like that whole loom is going to need replacing, fortunately I think some of it is redundant.
Strangely the black wire from the solenoid is fine until it joins the white/purple wire where it used to connect to the coil: Need to decide whether to attempt this myself.
