Practical Wiring - Professional Motorsport: Step 7 - Terminal Crimping and Connector Installation
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Step 7 - Terminal Crimping and Connector Installation
19.29
| 00:00 | - With our boot and label preparation complete from our last step, we can now move on and begin our terminal crimping and connector body installation. |
| 00:09 | Obviously on this particular harness, we've got a fair bit going on here, there are a lot of terminations, a lot of connectors that we're going to need to be crimping and installing. |
| 00:18 | This also becomes a bit of a rinse and repeat type process here, there really isn't anything particularly special between the different connector bodies. |
| 00:27 | For this reason, we're not going to demonstrate on camera every single termination. |
| 00:32 | I've selected two here that we're going to demonstrate and then we're going to skip ahead, just in order to keep the overall length of this particular worked example somewhat manageable. |
| 00:42 | So we're going to start here with our fuel composition sensor, our ethanol or flex fuel sensor. |
| 00:48 | And we've got our wries here, obviously from our last step, we've got our label and I've got a little section here of SCL that we're going to be using to seal this. |
| 00:57 | Unfortunately, the fuel composition sensor itself doesn't really lend itself too well to booting. |
| 01:04 | So we've got our connector body here and I've got this just stored away in a little plastic bag so that everything we need is going to be all in one place so I'll just get that out now and see what we're dealing with. |
| 01:16 | Obviously we've got the connector body itself, I've got this little purple clip that goes on the back once we've inserted our terminals. |
| 01:23 | We've got the terminals themselves, seem to be missing one, let's get that out as well, there we go, 3 terminals and then we've got our 3 little seals that we're going to need to install over our conductors. |
| 01:38 | Right so that's what we're going to be dealing with here, we'll just get this out of the way for the moment and we'll have a look at what we're going to be doing with our conductors. |
| 01:45 | Get these back under the shot and what I've done here you can see is I have left all of our little coloured idents in place. |
| 01:54 | Now the fact here, and this does really help us, the fact that we have chosen a colour coding for our wires as well means that I don't even really need those coloured idents here, I know for example that our red wire here, this is our 12 volt feed going to our flex fuel sensor, the black of course is a ground or earth and then the white wire is our signal. |
| 02:17 | Now we can leave those idents on if we want, I don't tend to like to do that. |
| 02:23 | Once I know where everything's going, I'm going to remove those idents. |
| 02:27 | Obviously our colour coding here goes without saying as we've just mentioned so we'll now remove those idents, get ready to cut our conductors to length. |
| 02:37 | Aright so with that done, we're going to need to leave a small section here where our little section of SCL is going to be heat recovered down to actually seal our wiring so I'm going to leave a little bit of length here on my conductors and then we'll just cut these to length here using our flush cut pliers. |
| 02:57 | With that done, what I'm going to do is just open these up so they're nice and easy to access and we're going to use our Ergo Elite wire strippers just to strip a small section of the insulation away. |
| 03:09 | Now what we want to do here is just examine the particular terminal that we're going to be using. |
| 03:15 | This gives us a bit of a guide here on what sort of length of exposed conductor we're going to need. |
| 03:21 | Now obviously we're going to be crimping here or stripping and crimping a number of different terminals. |
| 03:26 | There will be a variation in that strip length, this isn't super critical here either so for this purpose, I'm using a set of wire strippers with the little wire stop actually removed. |
| 03:38 | So this gives me the flexibility to set the strip length myself so we'll go ahead now and we'll strip those 3 conductors. |
| 03:49 | Alright with our insulation stripped there, let's just get our terminal back into shot here and we can see that yes we've got full engagement with the section that's going to be crimped down there so that's looking really good. |
| 04:02 | What we can do now is install our little seals and we're just going to simply push those over the wire. |
| 04:09 | You can choose to install these pre or post stripping. |
| 04:12 | There really isn't a need to do it one way or the other, what we do need to be a little bit mindful of if we're doing this post stripping the insulation, you want to be mindful that you're not going to end up catching the individual conductor strands and folding them away so let's get those installed now. |
| 04:32 | OK we're now ready to crimp our terminals into location and for the purposes here, I am simply going to be using our universal crimp tool here, it's nothing particularly special. |
| 04:41 | We've got a variety of different die locations depending on the specific terminal we're going to be using. |
| 04:47 | For our purposes here, we're going to be using die location E. |
| 04:51 | So what we'll do is we'll take our first terminal and we'll just get this located correctly so that we are ready to insert our wire, making sure that we've got full engagement here and we're ready to crimp down, so what we can do now is get our wires back into location and we'll start with our 12 V wire, our red wire and we're just going to install this into our crimp tool, making sure we've got full engagement there, we've got our wire in the correct location and now we can just manually crimp down, applying a reasonable amount of force to that and that will complete our crimp. |
| 05:26 | It's always a good idea just to inspect the crimp once it is complete, we've got full engagement, we've just got the conductor strands being visible past that crimp, we can give that a decent amount of force, a good tug, it's not going to move. |
| 05:38 | What we can then do is slide our little seal into location and we can complete the second operation of our crimp. |
| 05:47 | I'm going to do that in this order here, generally when we're crimping a lot, what I'd do is actually do that first operation on each terminal first and then come back and do that insulator. |
| 05:57 | It's just a simpler workflow and you tend to get into a bit of a rhythm, particularly when you're doing a lot of these connector bodies or terminals and that tends to make the job a little bit faster. |
| 06:08 | However, for our demonstration here, we'll start by completing the installation here on our red 12V wire. |
| 06:15 | So we're going to be using the other side of our crimp tool here to crimp down on the little seal so I'll just try and get our other 2 wires out of the way so we can see that clearly. |
| 06:25 | We'll get our terminal into location correctly, making sure that that is located nicely on the terminal. |
| 06:33 | And we can just crimp down on that and here all we're trying to do is make sure that we have got a nice firm grip on that little seal, we're not trying to damage the seal and we can see that that's the case, it is nicely located there. |
| 06:47 | So that's our first terminal installed, we'll now speed this up a little bit and get our second 2 terminals installed. |
| 07:04 | Alright we've got our 3 terminals crimped down there, we're comfortable that those are going to be nice, tight, reliable crimps, we've got our little seals in place as well. |
| 07:12 | Now it's time to actually insert those into our connector body. |
| 07:17 | Obviously here we want to pay special attention to the pin locations. |
| 07:21 | We've got that all in our documentation here and we know that the pin orientation, pin 1 is going to be our 12V, pin 2 our ground and pin 3 will be our signal. |
| 07:31 | Now if we look at our connector body here, it is going to be a little bit tough to see, but, I'll just grab a pointer here, pin 1 is labelled here and pin 3 on this side. |
| 07:44 | Most of these style of connectors are pretty straightforward though, you're going to be able to find easy documentation on the internet to find that correct orientation but very important to make sure that you correctly identify the pin location, it's going to save repinning these at a later point. |
| 08:02 | Another point with our connector body here is we can see we've got this purple section on the inside, this is essentially a lock that locks our terminals in place so if this is in the locked position, you will not be able to install those terminals and what you can do is just use a pick like I am here, that's in the extended or unlocked position, you can actually completely remove that as well. |
| 08:26 | So now we're going to make sure we've got our orientation for our connector body correct and we'll start inserting those terminals now. |
| 08:42 | Now you should hear a satisfying little click when the terminal is correctly installed. |
| 08:48 | Once it is installed, you won't be able to pull back and remove that. |
| 08:53 | That's a good sign you've got it correctly installed, let's get our other 2 terminals into location now. |
| 09:03 | Alright we've got our 3 terminals installed, we can now reinsert our lock and we can install our little lock on the back of the connector body as well. |
| 09:17 | Alright so we've got our termination now complete for our fuel composition sensor, we've got our terminals installed and crimped and we've installed those into the connector body. |
| 09:27 | We've installed our lock on the front and the back of the body and if we have a look at this under our overhead as well we can see we've got sufficient length here of our bare conductors, this gives us enough room for our section of SCL to be shrunk down on that. |
| 09:43 | We do want enough room there that we're not going to end up placing undue stress and strain on those wires when we shrink our SCL down and occasionally this might require a little bit of additional trimming once everything is installed. |
| 09:58 | That completes our first example here, let's just rearrange our harness and we'll have a look at our second example. |
| 10:06 | For this connector, we're going to be installing our Bosch combined pressure and temperature connector for our oil pressure and temperature. |
| 10:15 | Now this is a unusual sensor in that it does have 2 outputs so we've got our data sheet here, I'll just get this under our overhead, we can of course add our data sheet into our documentation as well. |
| 10:29 | What we're interested in here is our pin out, so we can see this shows looking into the sensor where the pin locations are going to be. |
| 10:36 | Now if we get our connector body under our overhead here, what we can actually see is that this is a 5 position connector and we're going to be using 4 of those positions. |
| 10:46 | We've got our 2 signals or pressure and temperature, we've got a 5V supply and our sensor 0V so one of these is not used. |
| 10:55 | Let's just get the rest of our materials out of this little bag that I've stored them in here and what we'll see here is that we've got our terminals of course, we'll get those out of the way for the moment. |
| 11:09 | We got 4 of these little blue seals and then we've got 1 white seal. |
| 11:14 | The white seal, again might be a little bit difficult to tell from our overhead shot but this has no hole through it so this isn't to go over one of our conductors, this is just a blanking plug. |
| 11:25 | So again we'll just get our datasheet into our shot here because we can start by just getting our blanking plug installed and this is the correct orientation for our connector here. |
| 11:38 | Our connector body. |
| 11:39 | So what we can do is just gently press that into location here which is the pin 1 location and that's going to also mean that there's no chance of us incorrectly installing these pins or I should say installing one in the incorrect location there, that unused pin 1. |
| 11:58 | Now before we move on as well, I'll just turn this over and what we'll see with this particular Bosch connector is there is this blue section here and this is essentially a locking tab. |
| 12:09 | Now this one, rather than pulling off the connector body completely like our last example, this one actually slides to the side and again might not be too obvious in this overhead but it's actually slid across to the left at the moment, leaving it in the unlocked position so again if we're having trouble with the installation of our terminals, this is a possibility that the connector is actually in the locked position. |
| 12:34 | Alright let's just move our materials out of the way here for a moment and we'll get our wiring under our overhead. |
| 12:41 | So as we can see, our oil p/t. |
| 12:44 | Now what I've done is just jumped ahead a little bit here and I have already gone and stripped, or cut and stripped 3 of our 4 wires here. |
| 12:55 | Now it's important here with our identifiers, this becomes quite critical when we're wanting to note which is our pressure and which is our temperature. |
| 13:06 | So what I've done is I've left the coloured idents here on this particular wire which is blue and black, that is 60 and if we jump across to our documentation, we can find what that particular signal wire is so let's have a look at that now. |
| 13:22 | Right, from our documentation we can see that the number 60 there is our oil pressure signal so of course the other one is our oil temperature. |
| 13:30 | I am going to leave those there until I've got the oil temperature signal wire installed in our connector body just to avoid any potential for mistakes. |
| 13:39 | So we've gone ahead and stripped off some of the insulation so I'm just going to now install our little seals over those wires. |
| 13:52 | Alright 3 of our 4 done there. |
| 13:55 | We're going to be using our same universal crimp tool that we've just used in our last example and again we're going to be using the die location E for these particular terminals. |
| 14:05 | Always useful if you can do a few test crimps and just find out for these general purpose tools, what die location is actually required for the terminal and the gauge of wire you're working with. |
| 14:16 | So we'll go ahead now and get our terminal installed and crimp that down. |
| 14:24 | Our first crimp complete there. |
| 14:26 | Again we can just check the integrity of that crimp, making sure that we have got enough force placed on it. |
| 14:31 | Now slide our seal into place and we can crimp that down using the other side of our crimp tool. |
| 14:42 | Alright we've got our first crimp completed there, everything's looking good so we'll move on and we'll just repeat this with the other conductors now. |
| 14:59 | Alright we've got 3 of our 4 conductors now terminated and we now need to deal with our 4th which is our unterminated pressure wire, so pressure signal. |
| 15:10 | So there's a couple of ways we can deal with this so that we don't get confused. |
| 15:13 | We could either choose to now pin out the temperature wire, temperature signal wire that we have got terminated, into the connector body and then go ahead and strip and crimp our remaining pressure signal. |
| 15:26 | Or alternatively what we can do is just choose to fold the wire back on itself so that it's really obvious and now we can remove our coloured idents for our pressure signal and go ahead and strip and terminate that and that's exactly what I'm doing to do, so let's get that done now. |
| 15:50 | Alright with that complete, it's now simply a process of correctly installing these into their relevant locations on our connector body. |
| 15:58 | Again obviously taking special care with our pressure and our temperature orientations so let's go ahead and get that done. |
| 16:10 | Now again a little hard possibly to hear in our example here but you will get a nice little positive click when that is correctly inserted so we've now got our pressure signal installed so no longer any danger of confusing our pressure and temperature so we can get our other white signal wire folded back into the correct orientation and we'll continue and pin out the remaining 3 locations. |
| 16:43 | Alright we've got our 4 terminals installed there, and one thing just to point out, and this is pretty self explanatory is a lot of these connectors, the terminal will have a single orientation where it will go in. |
| 16:55 | If you are dealing with a connector body that you're not familiar with, you may find that it takes a couple of attempts to find the correct orientation. |
| 17:02 | The key here is that the terminal should slide in nice and easily, it shouldn't require excessive force so if you find a situation where the terminal is not installing nice and cleanly then stop, reassess and see if maybe your orientation is incorrect. |
| 17:18 | So if we look at our connector body again, just like the previous one we looked at, we've got enough length here in our wires that when we slide our section of SCL into place and shrink that down, it's not going to be placing undue stress and strain on any of our wires. |
| 17:34 | The last operation here is that our little blue lock which we mentioned, we can now slide that across into the locked position and our terminals are now locked in place. |
| 17:43 | Also worth mentioning here just due to the location of this blue lock, if it is in the unlocked position, we're not going to actually be able to install it into the sensor itself. |
| 17:54 | So that's our 2 demonstrations complete there. |
| 17:57 | What we'll do now is jump ahead and we'll have a look at our harness with all of the remaining connector bodies installed. |
| 18:05 | Alright we've got the rest of our terminations complete here on our harness and of course it is in fact starting to look a little bit more like a finished harness. |
| 18:14 | A lot of work gone in up to this point but the light at the end of the tunnel is now visible. |
| 18:20 | We're just about at the end. |
| 18:22 | Now I'll just reiterate, a couple of points here, obviously when we are crimping and pinning out our connector bodies, the key is to make sure that we're taking special note of the positions for each of the conductors or terminals in those connector bodies. |
| 18:37 | We will be double checking this in our next step but getting this right off the bat is obviously going to save us a lot of time and effort. |
| 18:46 | The other thing to note as well is just making sure that we have sufficient length of exposed conductor between our DR25 and our connector body, we don't want this to be too tight on these connectors which are not going to be completely booted, otherwise we're going to end up placing undue strain on our conductors and in turn our terminals. |
| 19:09 | It's easy enough to carefully cut a little bit of additional DR25 off if we do find that we need a little bit of additional length in there. |
| 19:18 | So at this point with all of our terminals crimped and our connector bodies pinned out, we can move on with the next step of our process. |
