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Stephen Tashiro
12-09-2010, 9:40 PM
Anyone have thoughts about replacing broken electrical connectors in cars with connectors that are simpler to buy and perhaps use?

One way to replace an electrical connector in the engine compartment of a car is to find the replacement in a junk yard. However, this is time consuming. It would often be simpler to replace both the male and female parts of the connection with a new connector. It should be possible to buy connectors that are as weather proof and heat resistant as typical automotive connectors. The only problem that I see is that the wiring harness of a car usually has a great variety of connectors so that it is hard to mis-connect the OEM wires to the wrong things. A person using his own type of connector would have to find a sufficient variety of them if he wanted to preserve this idiot proofing feature.

Jason Roehl
12-09-2010, 9:45 PM
If you're going to splice in new connectors, make sure you solder the wires together at the splice and use heat-shrink tubing or silicone tape. If it's in an area close to high heat, get a plastic loom to cover the heat-shrink tubing.

Stephen Tashiro
12-09-2010, 11:48 PM
The easiest way might be to give up on the idiot-proofing feature and use the "Posi-Lock" type of connector with some color code scheme, perhaps spray paint in addition to the color of the connectors themselves. Those happen to be solderless connectors.

Larry Edgerton
12-10-2010, 7:01 AM
Check out a company called Waytec. We use their connectors on our off-road race trucks, good quality stuff, and they have it all.

Marty Paulus
12-13-2010, 1:27 PM
Keep in mind that with the 'error proofing' as we call it comes efficiency. Some of the larger connectors under the dash can have over 100 connections. Imagine how long that would take, in a production environment, to make that many individual connections?

Callan Campbell
12-13-2010, 1:58 PM
Some connectors and pins are supported by the auto maker after they've built the vehicle, some aren't. I've been lucky to work with well stocked kits of connector bodies, male and female pins, along with the removal and installation tools need to get the pins out of the connector you're working on. Hasn't always been that easy. I've had to do the "steal-a-connector-off-the-harness" trick more than once since no repair parts were available. Once, I had to get a new body harness, removed the SRS/Air Bag harness portion that was snaked through the body harness just to install that SRS harness into the existing body harness of the vehicle I was working on. The correct harness for the vehicle was no longer made, so the new harness was not the complete correct one for the vehicle, which meant alot more working fixing old and new together to make a working correct harness.
SRS/Air Bag systems aren't usually given repair pins or connectors due to fears of field repair at a shop becoming a lawsuit if things went wrong later on in a crash[Lawsuit city]. Another thing standing in your idea of pin/connector repair, the pins have become micro in size. They corroded easily since their diameter/cross section is now so small. The removal or access tools are tiny and fragile to work the connectors, easily lost or broken at most shops. It's getting harder and harder to successfully rework many late model connectors because of this. Once the "green goo" sets in, these new tiny pins and connectors are pretty seized up, and you break the plastic bodies trying to release them with the added "glue" of corrosion holding them together. Very frustrating