Practical Wiring - Club Level: Step 7: Terminating and Connector Installation
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Step 7: Terminating and Connector Installation
17.50
| 00:00 | - The seventh step of the HPA eight step harness construction process is the one of crimping all of the connector pins onto our bare wires at the end of our harness section and then installing those pins into the connector bodies, obviously in the correct location. |
| 00:16 | Now having a look at our auxiliary branch of our harness here, the first thing we need to do is actually trim these wires to the correct length. |
| 00:25 | When we laid out all the wires for our harness we did talk about adding a little bit extra, it was 100 millimetres in this instance, and we do still have that extra at the end of our harness here. |
| 00:35 | So we're going to have to trim that off to get this the right length, I'm gonna get my tape measure and measure that out and cut those wires to length. |
| 00:45 | From my documentation here, I can see my auxiliary branch needs to be 350 millimetres long from our branch point here. |
| 00:54 | So measuring that out to 350 millimetres, going to trim those wires off. |
| 01:08 | Now I've got that branch trimmed to length you will notice that our DR25 sheathing actually ends quite a long way before the end of those wires. |
| 01:16 | This is a decision we made at the sheathing stage as this is going to be pinned into a non bootable Deutsch DTM connector and we're going to want that extra length of wire to organise all these as they go into their correct pin location. |
| 01:30 | Next step in the process is going to be stripping back a section of insulation from these wires and crimping our terminals onto them. |
| 01:37 | I'm gonna have a look at our red power supply wire here which we know is a 22 gauge from our documentation, so I can use my strippers to strip back a section of insulation that's going to be the right length for our Deutsch DTM pin. |
| 01:57 | So I'll get a Deutsch DTM pin out, this is actually going to be a socket, as we have specified we're going to use a DTM male connector which take the sockets. |
| 02:08 | Also a good point to mention here that there are cheaper counterfeit Deutsch DTM connectors pretty prolifically available. |
| 02:16 | You'll find they almost universally come supplied with open barrel crimp pins which on the surface might seem like a good option to go with as it might mean that you don't need the closed barrel crimp tooling. |
| 02:28 | However I have found their quality to be pretty sub optimal. |
| 02:31 | So I would definitely suggest sticking sticking with genuine Deutsch DTM connectors if possible. |
| 02:37 | Now we've got the genuine Deutsch article here, I've got a closed barrel crimp pin, we're gonna get that installed in place and just confirming that we can still see around about a millimetre of our copper conductor strands at the base of that open barrel crimp section. |
| 02:51 | So that is gonna be the right length of insulation stripped back. |
| 02:54 | We'll get that installed in our crimp tool. |
| 03:01 | Squeeze those handles and crimp it down. |
| 03:07 | Quick optical inspection there, we can see through our inspection hole, our copper conductor strands so we know we have the copper all the way in there, our crimp indentations are nice and evenly spaced, and a bit of a tug test, and that's really tight on there, it's absolutely not going anywhere. |
| 03:24 | So with a good crimp join there I can go ahead and undertake exactly the same process in the rest of our wires. |
| 03:30 | After that we'll have a look at pinning them into that connector body. |
| 04:04 | Now that we've got a good reliable crimp connection onto all of those wires, it's time to start pinning these DTM pins into the connector body. |
| 04:11 | Now we're going to have to pin them into the correct location in that body, and that's going to be quite easy for the coloured wires here as we know their function, we can simply refer to our connection document and that's going to tell us where they have to go in that connector body. |
| 04:26 | It is a bit of a different situation for all our white wires here though, as it's not yet defined which function each individual wire here actually performs. |
| 04:34 | However at this stage of the process that is actually to our advantage. |
| 04:39 | Any one of these white wires heads back to our ECU end of the harness which is not yet pinned into its connector. |
| 04:46 | That means that we can insert these white wires into any of the other cavities in that DTM pin that need to be filled and then when we get to the stage of pinning out our ECU connector, we're going to use a multimeter to determine which wire needs to go into which location at the ECU connector end. |
| 05:03 | So I'm going to get our coloured wires here installed into our DTM connector body. |
| 05:09 | So I know our red is going to be our power supply and that needs to be in pin number location one, which on these Deutsch DTM connectors is this lower right hand corner when we're looking from the back. |
| 05:21 | So pinning these Deutsch DTM connectors is really easy. |
| 05:24 | Another reason I really like to use them. |
| 05:27 | We're gonna get that inserted directly from the back, through the seal, and it is gonna click into place nicely, exactly like so. |
| 05:35 | Looking from the front we can see we've got the face of the pin right up at the face of the connector and our locking tab down there is interfaced with the flange, so that pin is gonna be locked in place. |
| 05:48 | Gonna go ahead and pin out the rest of this connector now. |
| 05:50 | The procedure is exactly the same, our power ground is going to go into location two, sensor supply and sensor ground are in locations three and four, and the rest of the white wires, we're just going to insert where they're naturally going to want to fit. |
| 06:04 | Of course when we come to pin our ECU connector end, that is when their function will be defined. |
| 06:31 | We've got that connector fully populated now. |
| 06:34 | The last step of the process is going to be inserting the locking flange that goes at the front of this connector here. |
| 06:39 | Before we do that, just another quick visual inspection to check that all those flanges are interfaced with the locking flanges on those pins there, and the pins are all up at the very face of the connector. |
| 06:52 | So that's looking pretty good, gonna go ahead and get this locking piece in place, that should just click into place. |
| 06:59 | Like so. |
| 07:01 | And that is now assembled and those pins are locked in there and they're really not gonna be going anywhere. |
| 07:07 | Now it should be pretty clear at this stage why we made such a bit push earlier on to get all of our booting materials in place earlier in the construction process. |
| 07:16 | There's absolutely no way we're going to be able to get our booting material over the connector in this direction, that will then also shrink down onto our smaller harness here. |
| 07:26 | Luckily we've got that in place and we can slide it up past here and when we recover that down it is going to give us that really nice tidy end to this harness section. |
| 07:36 | Even before we had the connector body installed, but the pins still in place, having those pins crimped on to the wires there does actually bulk them out quite a lot and it can make getting that booting material in place pretty tricky. |
| 07:48 | So I do definitely like to get that installed on the harness section much earlier in the construction process. |
| 07:54 | Now speaking of our booting material, it is time to get that recovered into position and lock down this harness section. |
| 08:01 | We're just gonna have a last quick check that all of those pin locations are correct. |
| 08:06 | Definitely want to confirm that before we recover this boot down. |
| 08:10 | As you can see when we recover that, it is actually going to move the end of our sheathed section closer to our connector body and that can make repinning these wires a little bit tricky if you have to. |
| 08:21 | But they're all in the correct spot, so I'm gonna get my heat gun out on the bench and recover that into place. |
| 08:41 | We've got our SCL recovered onto that harness section end there. |
| 08:45 | And that does actually complete this harness section. |
| 08:48 | I did go ahead and abrade our DR25 at the end here then give it a quick clean with our isopropyl alcohol and that's formed a really nice bond there, and it is gripping that DR25 tightly, we've got a good sealing bead around there as well. |
| 09:02 | So that's gonna be our first completed section of harness there. |
| 09:06 | The rest of the procedure is very much a rinse and repeat out here at the engine bay side of the harness. |
| 09:11 | I'm going to go ahead and get our terminal pins crimped onto our wires for all the harness sections out here, get those pinned into their connector bodies. |
| 09:20 | At that stage we're going to have to pull out our multimeter and start testing the continuity between those connector bodies back to our ECU connector harness sections there as we are going to have to determine which of those white wires matches up with which connector body out here, to get them in the right location at the connector end. |
| 09:41 | Now I would definitely say this is going to be one of the lengthiest parts of your harness construction process. |
| 09:46 | However it is also one of the most rewarding as the finished example of your harness is really going to start to come to life before your eyes. |
| 09:54 | You want to be keeping a close eye on your connection documentation and your physical layout documentation when you're undertaking this step, as you don't want to make any mistakes now as they do become very hard to rectify from this point onwards. |
| 10:07 | So now I'm going to crimp the required pins onto the harness sections of the engine bay side of our harness here, get them installed in their connector bodies and get all those boots shrunk down. |
| 11:00 | Now we've got the majority of the connector pins crimped onto the wires of our harness and actually installed into the connector bodies, it's time to move into the interior section of the harness and start pinning out those ECU plugs. |
| 11:13 | This is where we start needing to use our multimeter to check the continuity of our wires to ensure that we are working with the right wire at the ECU end and installing it into the right connector location. |
| 11:24 | As an example of what I mean, we'll have a look at our ignition sub harness branch here and the two connectors we've got on the end. |
| 11:31 | The power supply connector is reasonably self explanatory, that's our large gauge black and red wire. |
| 11:38 | The signal connector is a little more complicated though. |
| 11:41 | We do need to identify all of these wires. |
| 11:44 | It's easy to do so for our secondary coil winding ground as we know that's going to be black and our sensor ground level, as we know that's going to be green. |
| 11:52 | That leaves us with four white wires. |
| 11:55 | Now these four white wires are all in our ignition sub harness branch, they're all heading back to our ECU one connector. |
| 12:03 | That means that before we crimp a terminal pin onto those and actually pin them into either of those connectors, they're all exactly the same as one another and they could be any of the ignition channels. |
| 12:14 | However once we do pin those into a connector body, their function does become fixed and now we need to make sure that we are selecting the correct white wire back at our ECU one end. |
| 12:24 | So I'm going to do this now. |
| 12:26 | I know that pin number three here is going to be our ignition channel number one. |
| 12:31 | So I can use my multimeter with the probe connected to pin number three of our DTM six way connector here, and I can then find the corresponding wire back at our ECU one connector end, I can crimp a terminal pin onto that and get it into the right pin location in that ECU header. |
| 12:47 | This procedure is fairly straightforward, you're going to want to get your multimeter our and set it to the continuity test mode so it makes an audible note when there is continuity between the two probes, much like that. |
| 13:01 | I've got some nice pin probes on here which are a really good size for testing these DTM connectors, I can get it nice and snug in the end there and it's not going to fall out and work its way loose while I'm probing the wires at the other end. |
| 13:16 | Now when you're undertaking any continuity measurement with your multimeter, you want to check its function beforehand, and again often as you're undertaking the process. |
| 13:25 | You would be amazed how easy it is for your multimeter to time out and turn itself off. |
| 13:30 | And if you're down the other end of the harness trying to find a specific wire, and you're not getting any continuity beeps, it's really frustrating to then look up and realise that you haven't found that wire because your mulimeter has actually turned itself off. |
| 13:43 | I've got everything working here so we'll get this all lined up and I'm going to go hunting for the other end of that ignition channel one wire at my ECU connector harness here. |
| 13:53 | Now visually I know it's going to be one of our TXL insulated white 22 gauge wires. |
| 13:58 | So I can separate all those out and get them into a bundle. |
| 14:04 | Possibly two bundles actually because they are on either side of this connector branch. |
| 14:09 | And we can then go through, testing each of these wires looking for that continuity signal. |
| 14:13 | So I'm gonna go ahead and do that now. |
| 14:25 | So we actually go really really lucky there, it was the second wire that I tested. |
| 14:30 | That doesn't happen particularly often but in this instance I'm going to take it as it can be a real time saver. |
| 14:36 | Now that I've identified the other end of my ignition channel one wire at the ECU harness here, I'm going to fold that wire back to keep it separated from the other ones while I prepare my terminal and get it crimped on there and actually get it installed in the connector body as well. |
| 14:57 | I've got our ECU one connector here, that's an AMP superseal 1.0 with the single key way. |
| 15:04 | And looking at our documentation, our ignition channel number one is pin 13. |
| 15:08 | So I can make sure that locking tab is unlocked which it is, and get that inserted in the correct location. |
| 15:16 | So 10, 11, 12, 13. |
| 15:22 | See they're all the way at the front of the connector there, so I know it's in place. |
| 15:26 | It really does pay to pin all of these individually and get them inserted into the connector one by one as that way you're guaranteed that you're not gonna lose your place when you're half way through the process. |
| 15:37 | So the rest of the process is exactly the same as what we've shown here. |
| 15:41 | I'm going to go ahead and probe the rest of my ignition channels, finding those wires back at our ECU one end and pinning them into that connector body. |
| 15:49 | We're then going to go through exactly the same procedure for the rest of our harness branches out here at the engine bay, finding our engine coolant temp signal wire, our intake air temp signal wire, and so on and so on until our ECU connectors are completely populated. |
| 16:05 | Now you will notice I haven't actually shrunk down our boots onto the end of our harness sections here as sometimes you do find you need to re pin one of these plugs slightly, and it is much much easier to do that when you haven't got this boot recovered in place. |
| 16:20 | So I am gonna leave that as the very last step we're going to do, before we do a design confirmation test of our harness and get it installed in the vehicle. |
| 16:28 | Gonna go ahead and use my multimeter to tone out the harness now, finding all those wires and getting them pinned into those connectors. |
| 17:18 | Now that we've got all of our connector bodies installed onto our harness and all our pins in those connector bodies in the correct location, things are really starting to look pretty finished. |
| 17:27 | We're almost at the stage where it is ready to get this harness installed in the vehicle however we're going to have one step to do before that, we really want to go through a little bit of a testing procedure to make sure what we've built here is actually going to match our design. |
| 17:41 | Now we're gonna get into that in the next step of the HPA eight step process. |
