MK6 Steering Wheel In a Mk4

[KrashDH]

Edit: Feel free to skip to Post #7 if you want to just see the final outcome. I was trying to make this a clean install without cutting, splicing or anything like that. I thought I was getting close into finding the wire terminals that I needed for the MK4 clockspring plug, but in the end, searched high and low, through all the threads here and on Vortex, and even with the "official" terminal threads, the clockspring terminals are still a mystery.

I wanted to avoid soldering because my soldering skills would have left too much solder on the joint, and I didn't want to increase any resistances on a critical airbag circuit, since they are sensitive.

Hey guys;

Trying to potentially source some VW terminals that are used on the clockspring plug for the MK4.

Here's the images of the 2x plugs I'm swapping. MK6 being the larger and MK4 being the 5 pin (flat). I'm doing a swap and trying to keep it as OEM as possible. I purchased from Canada what I thought was going to be plug n play harness, but unfortunately it's not for the 3-spoke Mk4.5 airbag, it's for the curved sides Mk4.5 airbag. I was willing to pay the money for what I thought would be a plug n play harness but unfortunately I'm either going to have to modify that one or find the correct terminals.

So I'm wondering if anyone knows what terminals are used in that MK4, 5 pin connector.

Thanks in advance!

 

[KrashDH]

Doing a bit more digging, I found this post on Vortex which is very helpful for terminals.
Now to figure out what is what? If these two shared terminals (Mk6 and Mk4), that would be great, but I don't think that's the case...

Edit; I found the MK4 connector P/N:

Still no matching terminals though. From images I've seen of the male pins (clock spring side) they are different from Mk4 to Mk6. The Mk6 are smaller in diameter or width at least, while the MK4's are "wider". This would lead me to believe there's a difference in the actual connector terminal.

 

[KrashDH]

I got excited because a box was waiting outside for me today. It was from the company (thru car-part.com) so I tore into it and there it was...a nice, beautiful, Mk6 GTI wheel...with no airbag! Sounds like they had to ship the airbag separately in it's own special box, but it did not arrive with the steering wheel. I guess I'll have to check back tomorrow. Thought I was going to be able to take a look at the harness tonight, maybe even de-pin it.:

 

[KrashDH]

It took me a while, but finally found the connector for the Mk6:

Now to figure out what terminals they both use...

 

[KrashDH]

Hey guys;

Trying to potentially source some VW terminals that are used on the clockspring plug for the MK4.

Here's the images of the 2x plugs I'm swapping. MK6 being the larger and MK4 being the 5 pin (flat). I'm doing a swap and trying to keep it as OEM as possible. I purchased from Canada what I thought was going to be plug n play harness, but unfortunately it's not for the 3-spoke Mk4.5 airbag, it's for the curved sides Mk4.5 airbag. I was willing to pay the money for what I thought would be a plug n play harness but unfortunately I'm either going to have to modify that one or find the correct terminals.

So I'm wondering if anyone knows what terminals are used in that MK4, 5 pin connector.

Thanks in advance!

With the Mk4 connector on the bottom, I think I may have found a winner:

Micro Timer 1.5mm connector. Not sure which pin (depending on the wire thickness).

N 10335706 - 1.5mm flat contact for 0.35-0.5mm²
N 10335807 - 1.5mm flat contact for 0.5-1.0mm²

Edit: These are not the terminals that were in my Mk4 harness, see below

 

[KrashDH]

Here is the terminal from the Mk4 airbag harness, released from the clockspring connector:

Here's to hoping the MK6 are the same!

 

[KrashDH]

Alright from this point, I'll just document how I swapped the MK6 wheel to my Mk4.

This was a MK6 wheel with the DSG paddle shifters, but no MFSW buttons. I expected the basic harness on the back of this thing without the MFSW connector in the harness (black, 5 pin). But when I got the airbag, in fact it DID have the MFSW harness. This threw me for a bit of a loop for my harness plans. Here's what I got:

Lets take a look at how this airbag harness functions. I've color coded for ease of follwing.

The airbag is directly grounded to that thick inner ring by the braided copper line.

The connection in yellow is grounded to that thick inner metal ring is well. The yellow connector/terminal is daisy-chained to the terminals circled in red. Essentially, the red terminals share that common ground with yellow. The single wire from the daisy chain runs back up to the main ground connection in the connector that I outline below.

You'll see 3/4 tabs circled in green (one is hidden). Those green "wings" are actually connected to the posts in circled in red. It's all 1 piece of thin stamped metal (the body is just under the plastic). When one, or multiple of those wings come in contact with the bar that circles around the circumference of the unit (light blue squares) it sends the ground along that path, through the bullet connection (also a light blue square at the bottom of the unit) up to the horn ground slot in the connector. Your horn activates.

Now, how to those "sheetmetal" wings make contact with that surrounding bar (you can't see well in the image, but at rest, the wings in green are "floating" above that bar)? That's where the design of the steering wheel/cavity comes into play.

I circled 4 edges in green to correspond with the green wings above. The airbag unit is on 4x springs. When you push the unit in to honk the horn, those 4 corners are at a certain depth that when pushed, they basically hold the wings in place and as you keep pushing, you push that metal bar "onto" the wing(s)...and your horn honks.

Now that we know how it works, it's easier to see what's going on with the harness and how you need to tie the MK4 and MK6 harnesses together.

You want to take note of how everything is routed if you do this.

What I ended up doing was basically de-pinning the Mk6 harness so I had all the daisy chained connections I needed still in tact. Then you have to snip the bullet connector for the horn with some extra lead wire, because you are going to need to tie that into the Mk4 plug as well.

Here's the MK4 connector after I finished. Left-->Right wires as follows:

1. Main Ground
2. Horn Ground
3. Airbag
4. Airbag

There's no polarity to the airbag circuit so it doesn't really matter which one goes to which slot. For the connections, I mentioned up above why I chose not to solder. My soldering is no bueno and I didn't want a glob to add any resistance to the circuit. What worked great though is I had some heat shrink butt connectors (they have the red or blue "shrink" material around them). They are kind of bulky and stiff after you shrink those, so what I did was extract the barrel from the shrink tubing, so I had a bare butt connector barrel. These were very small and low profile. I made sure to make a good mechanical connection and gave each one a solid yank afterwards to ensure they were solid. Then used some heat shrink tubing around the outside of the barrel. Very small, still flexible, and fit within the Mk6 wire sheath.

Here's the horn connection (red). Make sure you route all the wiring back how it was originally. You can see in this photo I started to do that.

With a couple pieces of cloth tape in the appropriate positions, it looks just like an OEM harness:

Here is the final, installed product:

 

[RexNICO]

Well done, looks REALLY nice.

And the feel of this wheel in your hands compared to the stock is significantly more substantial.

Job well done.

 

[KrashDH]

Well done, looks REALLY nice.

And the feel of this wheel in your hands compared to the stock is significantly more substantial.

Job well done.

Thank you. I'm very happy with the outcome.
Yes the feel it something else. Now to add more power. Probably a build thread coming in the future. Never thought I was going to hop the ole girl up...

 

[J_dude]

So... are MK6 airbags all single stage?

 

[KrashDH]

So... are MK6 airbags all single stage?

I haven't seen any that have 2 connectors... The extra black connector in this case was for the MFSW connector

 

[J_dude]

I haven't seen any that have 2 connectors... The extra black connector in this case was for the MFSW connector

Ok that’s good to know

 

[Dirt_Chicken]

Alright from this point, I'll just document how I swapped the MK6 wheel to my Mk4.

This was a MK6 wheel with the DSG paddle shifters, but no MFSW buttons. I expected the basic harness on the back of this thing without the MFSW connector in the harness (black, 5 pin). But when I got the airbag, in fact it DID have the MFSW harness. This threw me for a bit of a loop for my harness plans. Here's what I got:

Lets take a look at how this airbag harness functions. I've color coded for ease of follwing.

The airbag is directly grounded to that thick inner ring by the braided copper line.

The connection in yellow is grounded to that thick inner metal ring is well. The yellow connector/terminal is daisy-chained to the terminals circled in red. Essentially, the red terminals share that common ground with yellow. The single wire from the daisy chain runs back up to the main ground connection in the connector that I outline below.

You'll see 3/4 tabs circled in green (one is hidden). Those green "wings" are actually connected to the posts in circled in red. It's all 1 piece of thin stamped metal (the body is just under the plastic). When one, or multiple of those wings come in contact with the bar that circles around the circumference of the unit (light blue squares) it sends the ground along that path, through the bullet connection (also a light blue square at the bottom of the unit) up to the horn ground slot in the connector. Your horn activates.

Now, how to those "sheetmetal" wings make contact with that surrounding bar (you can't see well in the image, but at rest, the wings in green are "floating" above that bar)? That's where the design of the steering wheel/cavity comes into play.

I circled 4 edges in green to correspond with the green wings above. The airbag unit is on 4x springs. When you push the unit in to honk the horn, those 4 corners are at a certain depth that when pushed, they basically hold the wings in place and as you keep pushing, you push that metal bar "onto" the wing(s)...and your horn honks.

Now that we know how it works, it's easier to see what's going on with the harness and how you need to tie the MK4 and MK6 harnesses together.

You want to take note of how everything is routed if you do this.

What I ended up doing was basically de-pinning the Mk6 harness so I had all the daisy chained connections I needed still in tact. Then you have to snip the bullet connector for the horn with some extra lead wire, because you are going to need to tie that into the Mk4 plug as well.

Here's the MK4 connector after I finished. Left-->Right wires as follows:

1. Main Ground
2. Horn Ground
3. Airbag
4. Airbag

There's no polarity to the airbag circuit so it doesn't really matter which one goes to which slot. For the connections, I mentioned up above why I chose not to solder. My soldering is no bueno and I didn't want a glob to add any resistance to the circuit. What worked great though is I had some heat shrink butt connectors (they have the red or blue "shrink" material around them). They are kind of bulky and stiff after you shrink those, so what I did was extract the barrel from the shrink tubing, so I had a bare butt connector barrel. These were very small and low profile. I made sure to make a good mechanical connection and gave each one a solid yank afterwards to ensure they were solid. Then used some heat shrink tubing around the outside of the barrel. Very small, still flexible, and fit within the Mk6 wire sheath.

Here's the horn connection (red). Make sure you route all the wiring back how it was originally. You can see in this photo I started to do that.

With a couple pieces of cloth tape in the appropriate positions, it looks just like an OEM harness:

Here is the final, installed product:

Hi, I have a question! After researching multiple tutorials and resources similar to this, I seem to get confused when dealing with the MFSW harness. Most tutorials skip what happens to this and why. To give some context, I have a MK4 Jetta w/ a non MFSW, and I have a MK6 MFSW(buttons on both sides) and plan to eventually hook up all functionality with a Redbox (multifunction CAN-bus adaptor).

For the time being, I only really want to hook up the airbag and horn, and still at a loss of what to do with the little black harness that plugs into the inside of the wheel frame (connecting the control buttons).

- Should I connect it anyway?
- Should I label it and cut it up and use any of those wires?
- The soldering of the horn ground(s) isn't too clear, I'm certain one of these leads into the black harness

Not sure if I possibly mixed up the 2 horn wires, as I wired it up as best as I could understand (only 4 wires into the MK4 harness) and the airbag didn't deploy which is good, but no horn. I'm missing something to do with the horn wires that isn't clear to me.

Any advice w/ diagrams/ or clear images without watermarks will be extremely helpful and greatly appreciated!!!

 

[KrashDH]

I'm not sure I can help you on the MSFW side of things.

My car doesn't have the canbus that the later models have for the radio. Mine was a plane Jane connection and not the quad lock version.

I explained above how the ground and horn works.

For the connectors for the MSFW (black) if you're not using them for the time being, leave them be.
But I'd honestly use your Mk4 harness like I did.

Then again, I really had no desire to try and retrofit any steering wheel controls.

I can't really go back and provide and more diagrams or photos, I did this a while ago. Also not sure what your inferring was "watermarked" photos, I don't see that in this tutorial. These photos were uploaded to my media account and posted properly

 

[Dirt_Chicken]

I'm not sure I can help you on the MSFW side of things.

My car doesn't have the canbus that the later models have for the radio. Mine was a plane Jane connection and not the quad lock version.

I explained above how the ground and horn works.

For the connectors for the MSFW (black) if you're not using them for the time being, leave them be.
But I'd honestly use your Mk4 harness like I did.

Then again, I really had no desire to try and retrofit any steering wheel controls.

I can't really go back and provide and more diagrams or photos, I did this a while ago. Also not sure what your inferring was "watermarked" photos, I don't see that in this tutorial. These photos were uploaded to my media account and posted properly

Thank you for getting back to me!

My reference of watermarked pictures was from other forms of the same discussion topic and tutorial / walkthrough, even videos of the same thing and the video moves very fast through the wiring process and half the time the wiring harness is off camera for the most part!

I'm not planning on hooking up the CANBUS at this time, only the horn and the airbag, my question is the black plug shown in my attached pictures in your walkthrough, where does it go? I don't recall mention to completely chop it off and cap off the wires.

My question is what happens to the black plug, and which wires from the black plug are used (if any), and should I leave the black plug unplugged from the wheel inside until I get around to doing the controls?

I can't seem to figure out how to upload screenshots on here without linking to a URL, so here's a link to google photos from your post:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/HNoVB8VYPvtZ2x8e9

Also wanted to add that the MK6 wheel that I have has all black wires with the exception of two yellow wires for the airbag, this isn't too helpful lol!!!

 

[KrashDH]

Thank you for getting back to me!

My reference of watermarked pictures was from other forms of the same discussion topic and tutorial / walkthrough, even videos of the same thing and the video moves very fast through the wiring process and half the time the wiring harness is off camera for the most part!

I'm not planning on hooking up the CANBUS at this time, only the horn and the airbag, my question is the black plug shown in my attached pictures in your walkthrough, where does it go? I don't recall mention to completely chop it off and cap off the wires.

My question is what happens to the black plug, and which wires from the black plug are used (if any), and should I leave the black plug unplugged from the wheel inside until I get around to doing the controls?

I can't seem to figure out how to upload screenshots on here without linking to a URL, so here's a link to google photos from your post:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/HNoVB8VYPvtZ2x8e9

Also wanted to add that the MK6 wheel that I have has all black wires with the exception of two yellow wires for the airbag, this isn't too helpful lol!!!

Yes, your de-pin/snip the mk6 main plug (big yellow), remove the MSFW connector and it's terminals/wires (which ties into the main ground, so you have to snip the wire, but that's ok since you need to merge the Mk4 ground wire to the mk6 groud wire anyway).

In a nutshell, you're merging the 4 pin Mk4 plug to the mk6 harness. Removing the un necessary MSFW plug and respective wires after snipping off the mk6 main connector.

After you strip away the black connector, you tie the remaining wires properly to the Mk4 4 pin, main yellow connector as I described in post 7 at the end

 

[PakProtector]

Oh dear...you put a paddled DSG wheel into a 3-pedal car( grabs pitchfork and a torch ).

Have done this a few times with Mk5 wheels. Those need care in airbag selection as there are 2 stage ones out there. Butt connectors( bare ) and heatshrink have done the job well. Clip off the late clockspring connector, and apply the Mk4 one. I have a MFSW on one of the Jetta's and that is preventing me from enjoying the later wheel( the wheel has the only cruise control buttons ). In full disclosure, those don't work either due to my refusal to dig into the ECM/TCM wiring to complete the auto>manual swap.

Douglas

 

[KrashDH]

Oh dear...you put a paddled DSG wheel into a 3-pedal car( grabs pitchfork and a torch ).

What's your point? Who cares? The wheel is an upgrade in every form. The buttons are tactile, it's fun to mess with them. If I really wanted to get fancy, they CAN be useful for other things. You could have them control relay's to things like fog lights, or an aftermarket horn, or a turret mounted water cannon.
You don't hardly even notice the paddles, no one in the car has even called them out.
Seriously, if you have issues with these types of things, why even come in to comment?
This is a Mk6-Mk4 swap thread.

 

[PakProtector]

Krash, just the idea of pitchforks and torches is ludicrous. Trying something absurd and attempted humour. My apologies for failing. And just for the record, I did this once myself.

Douglas

 

[KrashDH]

Krash, just the idea of pitchforks and torches is ludicrous. Trying something absurd and attempted humour. My apologies for failing. And just for the record, I did this once myself.

Douglas

Yeah, my bad, I couldn't get the intention of humor over the interwebs based on how it was written.

 

[PakProtector]

Bah! think nothing ov it Krash...

Douglas

 

[Dirt_Chicken]

What's your point? Who cares? The wheel is an upgrade in every form. The buttons are tactile, it's fun to mess with them. If I really wanted to get fancy, they CAN be useful for other things. You could have them control relay's to things like fog lights, or an aftermarket horn, or a turret mounted water cannon.
You don't hardly even notice the paddles, no one in the car has even called them out.
Seriously, if you have issues with these types of things, why even come in to comment?
This is a Mk6-Mk4 swap thread.

The vw equipped with a water turret sounds like a valuable upgrade from my current 2 cupholder and non-AC glovebox. I actually have the exact same airbag/inner part of the wheel, and it came from a car w/o paddle shifters. I was mixing things up from several tutorials where they had coloured wires and didn't take enough time to really trace the wires down to the "bullet connector". Will hopefully have this soldered up soon!

 

[Dirt_Chicken]

*Update: It was much more clear after removing the MFSW connector. Turns out that last night before soldering, I thought I made a mistake and switched 2 black wires. Turned out the black wire for the horn ground was one of the wires, and it wasn't connected. Fingers crossed it works and I have my horn back!

Updated wiring

 

[KrashDH]

*Update: It was much more clear after removing the MFSW connector. Turns out that last night before soldering, I thought I made a mistake and switched 2 black wires. Turned out the black wire for the horn ground was one of the wires, and it wasn't connected. Fingers crossed it works and I have my horn back!

Updated wiring

Post it up when you get it all finished. Just a couple weeks ago I finally replaced my high and low horn set since one of the two has been failed for years. It's nice having both back. I got the Hella kit and it sounds good

 

[spifflifkin]

That's really cool!

 

[Zak99b5]

Post it up when you get it all finished. Just a couple weeks ago I finally replaced my high and low horn set since one of the two has been failed for years. It's nice having both back. I got the Hella kit and it sounds good

Need a root AND a fifth!

 

[PakProtector]

Just followed this for my '05 Golf. My wheel came with all the buttons, and not the clean, deleted one Krash got... The airbag needs to be seated just so or the horn won't work. After pulling it out and flipping the wee contacts to confirm the horn actually worked, I re-seated it and had no issues. The other cars have Mk5 wheels, save one that came with a leather MFSW and no cruise on the turn signal stalk.

The horn wires with the female spade connectors all went to the main ground pin on the Mk4 connector, and the single went to horn ground.

Used but bare butt connectors with shrink tube. No solder. Recall NASA did not use solder but instead square pegs the wee Cu wires got wrapped around when they needed ABSOLUTE reliability. Squeezing the butt connectors gives solid, air tight connections. Also stagger the wire joints so two connectors are nor right side by side and making the bundle fatter.

Douglas