The last month has been a busy one for me and old Grace. Over the
holidays, I had a fair amount of time off, but Jen didn't, so I watched
Max a lot. It gave me a renewed appreciation for the toddler wrestling that she does on a daily basis.
Then when Max was asleep and I wasn't the toddler wrestling champion of the Great Lakes Region, I went out to the garage and got to work on the hoses and wiring harness.
The hoses were pretty straightforward as usual. I pulled out my old home made hose end installation tools (that saga can be read here) and made a few crimps and it was done. It might have taken a couple hours at a maximum.
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| Silicone fire sheath on a fuel hose |
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| This fuel hose runs close to a header, I figured I should protect it. |
The big job here was the wiring harness. That's always a big job, but as I've said before, I really kinda like it. You know that satisfaction some people get from wrapping Christmas presents? Yeah, I don't get that feeling from wrapping presents, but I do get it from making a neat, tidy wiring harness. Now I'm not making some multi-thousand dollar motorsports harness (though I'd love to learn to do that), I'm just making a well-organized wiring harness that will work in a street/performance environment and not give me any trouble.
Since my old harness for the 2.3 was pretty good, and a few things were staying the same, I pulled the old harness out and started stripping it down. Pretty quickly I had it separated into the re-use pile and the "don't throw out because it might come in handy at some point" pile.
Several months ago, I found a seller on eBay selling remnants of wiring harnesses from projects in their shop for 20 bucks. This was a fantastic deal. It allowed me to get about 40 six foot strands of wire, each in a unique color/stripe combination. From this bundle I pulled 8 injector wires, 8 coil wires, and a few other random wires.
There were also a number of power feed and ground wires which I had to add. For this, I bought a couple hundred foot rolls of TXL wire from Del City. I highly recommend them, as it was only about 5 dollars for each hundred foot roll of 22 gauge wire, and it seems to be good quality. Because so many devices needed power and ground, I ended up doing quite a few splice joints.
Another resource I came across while planning this harness was High Performance Academy. They provide courses on various automotive wiring, tuning, and ECU related topics. Most of their courses are paid, but I got lucky and the one on splicing was free!
I then laid all the wires out and bundled them together with zipties and blue tape, approximating their location in the engine bay. Rubber coated cloth friction tape then wrapped the harness in select locations to shape and protect the harness. Friction tape is nice, because unlike electrical tape, it doesn't leave any sticky goop on the harness. Sticky goop is not good times.
Sheathing came next. Once again, I relied primarily on expandable braided loom. One advantage I had over last time was that I had a better idea of where everything in the engine bay needed to go, so there are no zip-ties in the final harness.
Sourcing connectors and terminals is one of the more challenging aspects of wire harness building. It's fairly easy to find pigtails (connectors with pre-crimped terminals and a "pigtail" of wire), but to find un-crimped terminals can be a real challenge. Some of the sources I used and highly recommend are Corsa-Technic, Ron Francis Wiring, and Ballenger Motorsports.
The injector and coil connectors I sourced from random eBay sellers because they were cheap. This was a mistake. First off, when comparing connectors and terminals to the genuine articles from the above listed sellers, they don't have anywhere near the quality control. The connectors had parting lines from the molds, and just didn't seem to be anywhere near OEM quality. The terminals were hard to crimp consistently and didn't lock into place as securely as I would like. And I also found that I had been shorted a terminal in my coil connector kit. Thankfully when I ordered from Corsa-Technic, I had picked up several extra terminals of the same type that are used in the coil connectors. Going forward, I'll definitely use only reputable suppliers for connectors and terminals.
Another item I was turned on to by High Performance Academy was the solder shrink sleeve. My crank signal wire is a shielded wire, but I never knew how to properly connect the shield to ground. Now I know. The shielding strands are folded back on the outer casing of the shielded wire assembly and a solder shrink sleeve is slipped over it. The heat gun melts the solder, making a connection between the shielding and the green pigtail, and then the heat shrink keeps it all contained and protected. This is the one location in a wiring harness where solder should be used. Nowhere else.
This is the final product. One of the nights I was out in the garage, a friend was hanging out while I worked. He commented as I pulled the harness through the firewall and out of the engine bay to make some adjustments that it looked like I was pulling the nervous system out of an animal carcass. And I guess in a way, that was exactly what I was doing.
Harness complete, I turned my attention to re-configuring the ECU. The Megasquirt ECU, while it has it's shortcomings is pretty nice because of it's flexibility. It does take some know-how, but it really can do a lot in a very cheap package. Maybe someday I'll upgrade to something nicer, but for now it'll do just fine. Anyway, I spent an evening watching some bizzare Netflix show with Jen and my soldering iron. I think Jen was jealous.
And to top it all off, I then did more automotive yoga in the driver's side footwell to hook up the harness and make sure it wasn't going to self destruct due to vibration and sharp sheet metal edges. It's always a good time.
Thats it for fuel lines and wiring, but stay tuned...
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