Making my own patch harness... Options

[lagos]

Recently we had a little mini group buy for oem pins and connectors on ctech and mr2oc.
I decided to pick up a set and make a patch harness. Right now my current harness is repinned to work with my 93 sard rom tuned ecu. This patch harness will allow me to convert back from a 93 sard ecu, to my original 90 ecu. The idea here is to at some point go back to my oem ecu, have it run most of the cars functions (like AC, coolant gauge,etc..) and then splice in the critical engine functions to be controlled by Megasquirt (somewhere down the road). I used OEM wire, stripped it, crimped on the pins and inserted them into the connectors. Then I will solder the other ends to the female ecu plug to make a patch harness.


The pins..


The plugs..


Soldered and heat shrinked one wire to the other end to test how that would work...


And here is what I have done so far...

[lagos]

Just as a helpful hint, make sure you have the plugs plugged in when you're soldering on those wires (as you have in the photo).

It gives the pins just that little bit more heat sinking, otherwise the pin can slide right out of the housing (and that's a real PITA).

When I've done this kind of thing before I usually leave the pins at right angles in case the plastic has heated up, a tug on the wire won't pull the pins directly out, strain relief I guess you could call it.

Maybe when you're done you could hot glue or epoxy all the pins together.

Good luck.

I'm not sure if I fully understand...
The pins that I installed into the plug lock in place when you slide them into the gray plugs.

As for the other end, you just wrap the wire out of the pins that are sticking out, solder, and use heat shrink. I have seen people put a layer of epoxy over all of the pins once they are done, but personally I see no reason why anyone would do that, unless they somehow crimped those pins on as well.