Practical Wiring - Professional Motorsport: Step 6 - Connector Boot Preparation and Labelling
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Step 6 - Connector Boot Preparation and Labelling
07.41
| 00:00 | - The sixth step of the 10 step HPA professional motorsport wiring harness construction process is all about getting our labelling and our connector booting materials in place on the harness while we've still got access. |
| 00:12 | Now this is going to be quite a short module compared to the huge amount of work that we've just put in to complete step five. |
| 00:19 | But it really is worth taking the time to separate this step out and focus on it just by itself. |
| 00:26 | The reason for that is when completing that work in step five, you tend to get into a little bit of a rhythm and it can be really really easy to simply want to continue on with your harness construction process. |
| 00:37 | You can see that off camera we have organised, twisted and sheathed the rest of our harness sections here and the temptation now would be to start pinning our connector pins onto our wires and inserting them into those connector bodies. |
| 00:54 | But before we do that we really just need to take a bit of a pause, step back, have a look at where we're up to. |
| 00:59 | Get our labels printed out and all our labelling materials in place and our connector boots in place as well before we lose access to the end of our harness sections here. |
| 01:10 | This process is covered in quite a lot of detail in both the fundamentals and the practical club level courses and it really doesn't differ here at all. |
| 01:19 | I've gone ahead, and using our Dymo heat shrink label printer, have printed out all the labels we're going to need for our harness and I've organised everything into nice bags with our connector bodies and the pins that we're going to need as well. |
| 01:35 | So just to recap, the way we label the end of our harness is with labels printed onto heat shrinkable tubing which we recover onto our harness sections and then protect with a section of clear heatshrink as well. |
| 01:47 | The sizing of these materials can be a little more limited than the sheathing that we've used on our harness, however there will be an applicable size, and the way you select that size is you want the smallest possible piece of heat shrink that will fit onto that harness section before it's been recovered, as that ensures when you apply heat and recover it into place, it'll be a really nice tight fit. |
| 02:08 | So I've gone ahead and prepared all the labels for our harness here. |
| 02:12 | In particular I'm going to have a look at our oil pressure sensor connector. |
| 02:17 | So I'll just get those out of our bag here, I've got our piece of RT375 clear heat shrink there and our engine oil pressure label. |
| 02:28 | When we're putting these into the harness, what we want to be thinking of is the order in which we're going to be recovering them back down onto our sheathing. |
| 02:36 | Now that's going to be the label first and then followed by that clear heat shrink, which means what we actually want to do is install the clear heat shrink onto that harness section first, which is our engine oil pressure sensor section here. |
| 02:50 | I've still got a temporary cable tie on the end of that, just keeping everything nice and tightly in place which this isn't actually going to fit over so I'm just going to have to remove that. |
| 03:02 | Get our piece of clear heat shrink into place here and then we're going to get our labelling material into place. |
| 03:10 | Because this is flat, it's the way it comes out of the printer, it can be a little bit finicky so we'll just try and open that out. |
| 03:17 | Paying attention to the direction that the text is going to be when this is recovered onto that harness section as well. |
| 03:24 | I've got a standard that I just adhere to here which is that I like all my harnesses to have the labels read towards the end of that harness section or towards the connector. |
| 03:35 | By sticking to that standard, it's just going to help give the harness a much nicer professional appearance when it's finished with all those labels pointing in the same direction. |
| 03:45 | So I'll go ahead and get this label installed in place now. |
| 03:48 | I'm actually just going to trim off this piece of lacing cord back to the Kapton tape that was on the end of this harness section here. |
| 03:56 | And as I've removed that cable tie, this is going to unravel anyway. |
| 04:04 | To open up this label here, possibly an Autosport pin extraction tool is going to work quite nicely. |
| 04:15 | Got that opened up and just get it onto our harness section. |
| 04:19 | With that in place I'm simply going to slide that labelling material back down towards the branch point and just leave it in place for the moment. |
| 04:27 | We will recover that as one of the last steps of the harness construction process actually at the same time that we recover our transition point and our connector boots as well. |
| 04:38 | Now you want to go ahead and do that for all of the remaining harness sections on the harness now. |
| 04:43 | Good to get that labelling material in place nice and early on and tick that job off the list. |
| 04:48 | The next job is going to be very similar but it's going to be the booting material that's going to seal our harness sheathing to the connector body when we install our pins and actually terminate our harness sections to those connector bodies. |
| 05:03 | Now there's two situations you're going to strike here. |
| 05:06 | If you are terminating to a circular Autosport or a Souriau 8STA connector, you'll be using a boot that is specifically designed for that connector body and it'll actually be large enough in its unrecovered form to slide over that connector body. |
| 05:24 | So if that's the case, you don't have to install that boot right now, you can do it further down the line. |
| 05:30 | A good example of that being our right angle connections here that make the connection to our bulkhead for this harness. |
| 05:39 | I haven't had to worry about getting the boost for those installed at the moment as I know they are large enough to actually get in place at any time. |
| 05:47 | However that's not always the case. |
| 05:50 | And in particular with our engine oil pressure branch example here, it's going to be terminated to a Delphi GT150 three pin connector, really common connector for those pressure sensors, and we're going to be using a section of Raychem SCL to boot that. |
| 06:07 | So having a look in our bag of prepared materials here, this is actually a DTM2 pin, that's for the engine oil temperature connector, and we've got our GT153 pin for our pressure sensor here. |
| 06:23 | And I've got a couple of pre cut sections of our SCL. |
| 06:27 | Now this is not big enough to fit over that connector body once we've got this terminated onto our harness section. |
| 06:35 | And for that reason, we really need to make sure that we do go ahead and get that in place onto that harness section now. |
| 06:43 | Now this might seem like a fairly trivial detail that I'm making quite a big deal about but I am doing that for a fairly specific reason. |
| 06:52 | The further along the harness construction process that we get, the more damaging any mistakes can be, and the more time they're going to take to rectify. |
| 07:01 | So it is absolutely worth breaking this procedure out into a totally separate step and ensuring that you really focus on it in detail and get all those materials in place to ensure that when we pin our wires out to our connector terminals and terminate them into our connector bodies, we're not going to then have a nasty surprise, not being able to get our booting materials into place. |
| 07:23 | So what I'm going to do now is get all those materials into place and then we're going to move onto step seven of our 10 step process, which is going to be terminating our wires to our connector pins and installing those connector bodies. |
