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Practical Wiring - Club Level: Crimping Terminals

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Crimping Terminals

07.03

00:00 - The crimping process is the one of fitting the terminal pins to the end of our harness sections which are then going to get installed into the connector bodies.
00:08 Now we have covered this process thoroughly in our EFI wiring fundamentals course, however we have a slightly different example here which I'm going to go through that'll show you a couple of different details to be aware of.
00:19 The example that we're going to have a look at is going to be crimping an OEM terminal onto the end of a piece of shielded cable.
00:26 In this instance it is a Sumitomo DL 090 series connector and it's for the engine position sensor on our FD3S RX-7.
00:35 That's the reason we've used our twisted shielded pair cabling.
00:38 Now the first thing we're going to do is ensure that this harness section is actually the correct length.
00:43 When we've gone through the rest of the harness construction process, we have left a little bit of extra length on the wires, so we can expect this to be slightly too long.
00:50 Gonna get my tape measure out and measure this form our branch point against the documentation, ensuring that everything is the correct length.
00:59 So according to our documentation here, we're looking for 250 millimetres, which means I'm going to trim my wire off right here.
01:14 With that harness section cut to the correct length, we're going to have to strip back the outer jacket of this twisted shielded pair cable here.
01:20 Now this process was shown in the splicing to a shield braid skills section and it is the same here.
01:26 I'm simply going to score around the edge of our shield jacket here, we're then going to bend it and that's going to break it open, we're going to make a slight score line down the length of it and peel it off the cable.
01:39 I'm going to do that right back where the DR25 ends, as that way when we slide our sealing boot down, and shrink it into place, it is going to isolate the strands of that shielded conductor braid, as we really do only want that to be grounded at the one end, which is going to be the ECU end.
01:54 So I'll get my knife out and I'll make those score lines now and remove that section of insulation.
02:07 Now that we've exposed our shield conductor braid, we are going to have to trim back that braid to get to the signal wires underneath, onto which we're going to crimp the pins.
02:15 To do this we will push back that shielded braid to expand it out down here at the base where we have stripped it off, I'm then going to take my electrical flush cutters and trim around that section, separating this braid from the rest of the cable.
02:29 Need to be careful when you're doing this that you don't nick those signal wires underneath, but by pressing it back and expanding it out, it is quite easy to do this.
02:42 With that shielded braid trimmed out of the way we can now get on with the process of stripping some of the insulation off our signal wires and crimping our terminal pins into place.
02:52 Now I'm going to strip a fair amount of insulation off the end of our signal wires here, possibly more than would be necessary to fit through the open barrel section of our pin.
03:02 The reason for this is that the only pins we've been able to source for fitting these Sumitomo DL 090 series connector bodies are capable of accepting wire gauge sizes from 18 to 20.
03:13 We've got 22 gauge wire here so we're gonna be a little bit light on the amount of copper we're gonna need to get a reliable crimp join.
03:20 What you can do in this situation is strip back slightly more insulation and actually fold the copper conductor strands around to give you that extra copper.
03:28 Now this technique is only going to work as long as the pin that you're crimping onto that wire has a good strain relief method.
03:34 In this instance these DL 090 series connectors use an integrated wire seal that is crimped onto the wire here, and that is going to give us the strain relief that we're going to require.
03:44 So I'll go ahead and get those copper conductor strands exposed now.
03:51 You can see we've got our copper conductor strands exposed there with a good section of insulation stripped back.
03:57 If I get one of our DL 090 terminals and hold it up next to the wire there, you can see I have stripped an excessive amount of the insulation back, exposing quite a lot of copper but as I mentioned, we are actually going to fold that over to give us the required amount of copper for a good solid crimp join here.
04:14 What I'm gonna do at this stage is install the wire seal onto the wire there, as once we've folded that over it is gonna be just a bit tricky to get that wire seal into place.
04:24 So I will get my wire seal here and get those into place.
04:30 With those wires seals in place, I'm now going to fold over our copper conductor strands, halfway up their exposed length.
04:37 To do this I like to use my mini needle nose pliers as you can get quite a sharp crisp bend on there so we'll go ahead and I'll get those bent around now.
04:51 So with that section of wire there all prepared, it's time to get the terminal and get it situated into our crimp tool, get everything lined up and undertake that crimp operation.
05:01 Now off camera I have undertaken the test crimps as we've outlined in the EFI wiring fundamentals course, and I know that on my general purpose crimp tool here using die size d, is actually going to give me a really really nice crimp with these Sumitomo 090 connectors.
05:17 So I'll get this terminal lined up into our crimp tool now on die size d there.
05:24 So that's all in place, and just double checking those wire seals are in place, we can insert our copper conductor strands into that open barrel crimp section, making sure we can see them on either side there, gone a little bit too far, we'll just pull that back.
05:42 Right there is where we need to be, and we can go ahead, put pressure on those handles and undertake that crimp join.
05:54 Got a nice solid crimp there, it's meeting down the middle, and you can in fact perform our tug test.
06:02 It's really not going anywhere, nice and tight.
06:05 Once again, from our test crimps performed off camera, I know that our round a section die here is gonna give us a really nice crimp onto that wire seal, so I'll go ahead and get that lined up now and get that crimp undertaken.
06:23 Everything's in place there, we're gonna squeeze the handles, and that crimp is performed.
06:32 Quick visual inspection there, we can see we've got a nice tight grip on that wire seal, it's not moving anywhere, and that is gonna strain relieve that wire and make sure this is a really good crimp join for the life of the wiring harness.
06:45 The rest of the procedure is exactly the same, we're going to go ahead and crimp our terminal onto this other wire here, and then slide our wire seal down, make the strain relief crimp and then that's gonna be ready for the last stage of that process which is pinning it into the connector body.

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