Former VWDieselParts.com Forum

I am very familiar with 79,81 and 85 glowplugs. My 98 Beetle's hood latch was broken. I have finally used a slim jim to get the hood open. I guess I know where the glow plugs are. but it looks nothing like my old VW Diesels What does the glowplug power bus look like and how do I disconnect it? On my old engines the copper bus bar and nuts threaded on top of each plug were obvious. What does the TDi glow plug power bus look like and how do I disconnect it? I just need to test/replace glow plugs. JUST PULL IT Off carefully! Sounds good to me.I was familiar with seeing the nut threaded on the top of the old 1.6 plugs. If just pulling it(Wire) off was not the correct proceedure and it was not the glow plugs I could have broken something! THANKS!
I pulled the Black round rubber harness off the plugs.
I removed #1 and #2 glow plugs with a deep 10 MM 6 point socket wrench.# 1 and 2 plugs appear good. #3 plug appears rounded: wrench turns but plug does not come loose or out 8-( BAD NEWS

The glow plugs are found under each cooresponding injector on the head. You can remove the glow plug relay (if it doesn't run anything else) and that should disable the glow plugs. Any reason why you want to disable them?

As mentioned earlier, under each injector. The harness is a molded rubber harness that covers all four glow plugs. You just pull it off carefully. The wires have to be cut to remove it completely from the engine harness to replace it, and new wires spliced in but you should be able to remove it without cutting the wires if you just wanna get at the glow plugs to replace them or whatever. .. Alot of the 98 harnesses were faulty.

I finally got the harness off the plugs. No 12 volt when the glow plug dash light is on and the dash glow plug light only comes on for a second. I also did this test with the coolant temperature sensor disconnected. So then I went looking for the glow plug relay in the panel behind(above) the sound insulator under the dash near the OBD plug connector. There are a couple of relays (little gray plactic cubes) How do I identify which is for the Glow plugs? One has 53 on it the other has 18 with two empty spckets to the right. My Chilton Manual has a beautiful picture of this but does not identify which is which. It has an arrow pointing to one and says this is a relay but not which relay. Picture also has a pointer to a smaller device and notes that one is a fuse.

The black relay with 173 on top is the fuel pump relay. One down two to Go