When doing a large automotive project you will inevitably need to do some electical work at some point. One common problem when swaping electronics from one car to another is missing or damaged connectors for your various sensors. For example, say you got that crank sensor from the salvage yard that you've been hunting for weeks but you forgot to get the connector and a few inches of it's wire to splice it into your harness. What now, go buy it at O'Reilly's? Ya right, good luck finding it there! So, facing this problem on my project I decided to get creative and figure something out.
Here's the part and it's sensor. It's an accelerator pedal and APP (accelerator pedal position) sensor out of a 350Z. The problem was I didn't have the female plug that plugs into the APPS.
So, I dug around in my spare electrical parts bag and found a Nissan female plug from an old VQ30DE engine harness that I had cut up.
That orange insert is what locks the pins in place, with the right tool it pops right out of there.
The "right tool" is the 90 degree pick in the middle of this shot:
Then use the pick again to press in on the locking tabs and pull the pins out from the back, it won't take much force to pull them out, make sure you've got the locks depressed correctly.
Next you need to acquire a matched female/male connector pair from your spare parts bag with at least as many wires as your project calls for. I need a pair with at least 6 wires but only had an 8 wire set available so that's what I used.
Now, strip all the wires and get ready to splice them to the 6 pins you removed earlier. I prefer not to solder but instead to use non insulated wire crimps from Radio Shack. Then I use high quality heat shrink tubing (I get it from Lowe's, O'Reilly's stuff really sucks) to insulate the connection. Many people will say that soldering is superior but I disagree. I've taken apart several factory Nissan harnesses and I've found they always use crimped joints rather than soldered. Plus, solder is messy, hot, dangerous and difficult to do right.
Next, make your crimps and shrink down the insulation:
Here's what they should look like when you're all done:
Now, insert all of your new bare female pins onto their male connectors. To help keep them solid and rigid I used some pure silicon. Squeeze it onto all of your wires and let it set overnight. Caution, I have yet to test the silicon to make sure it doesn't conduct electricity so this step is very experimental!
And that's about it. I now have a fully functional connection for my APPS using some spare parts and a little ingenuity. I'll finish it up by wrapping the wires in some high quality tape and putting some tape around the actual connection for extra security.
Thanks,
Fred
Instrument Cluster and Speedometer Repair