Practical Wiring - Professional Motorsport: Step 8 - Continuity Testing
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Step 8 - Continuity Testing
05.56
| 00:00 | - The next step of our 10 step process is to continuity check all of our terminations and this is simply to ensure that we haven't accidentally made an error when we've been pinning out any of our connector bodies and essentially making sure that everything on the harness does match perfectly to our documentation. |
| 00:19 | Now if we have worked methodically and we've followed our build documentation, we shouldn't really uncover any issues here but of course we are human and sometimes mistakes do happen. |
| 00:30 | While this is going to be a regrettable situation if we do find an issue, this is however the easiest time to rectify it. |
| 00:39 | If we go through the following step from here and we've recovered all of our transitions and our heat moulded boots, it's going to be a much larger job to recover a mistake when we actually finally connect everything up and wonder why our harness isn't working as we'd expect. |
| 00:54 | In a professional sense, this task would be completed on what's referred to as a hipot tester, however this is an expensive piece of equipment and certainly at the hobbyist and semi professional level, it's unlikely we're going to have access to one. |
| 01:10 | However we can do an acceptable job here, simply using a very basic multimeter which is what I've got in front of me. |
| 01:19 | So for this, what we're going to do is just set our multimeter into the continuity testing mode and now if we just take our two prongs from our multimeter and touch them together, we can hear that we get a tone that indicates that we do have continuity. |
| 01:36 | From here, this is a fairly time consuming task and we want to work methodically essentially through our bulkhead connector and just check that everything does match our documentation. |
| 01:48 | Obviously I'm not going to cover each element of this in real time here for our worked example but let's have a quick look at a demonstration. |
| 01:56 | So if we look at our documentation here, we'll work through here to terminal position number 4, we know that this in our instance here is battery negative 3 and that will be going to our ground point so let's just have a look at how we can test that. |
| 02:14 | Obviously we need a way of back probing into the autosport connector here and the easiest way to do this is to simply use one of the matching pins. |
| 02:24 | Obviously we've got sockets in our connector so we need a pin to go into that, try and get this under our overhead and we'll be able to see how this all looks. |
| 02:33 | Now it is difficult to see, it's very very small but there are numbered locations here, of course we've used these as we've pinned out the body. |
| 02:41 | So if we count from this position here, 1, 2, 3, position 4, that is where we want to insert our pin. |
| 02:48 | That's going to allow us to back probe into that location. |
| 02:51 | Now what we'll get is our ground point here under our overhead camera and we can simply connect our multimeter to our ground point and we'll touch it to the other point and we've got continuity. |
| 03:06 | So we know that we've got the ground pin going to the correct ground terminal location, everything's looking good from here, it's really a rinse and repeat of that process. |
| 03:15 | Let's have a look at one more because back probing into some of our connector bodies can be a little bit tricky. |
| 03:22 | So what we're going to do here is have a look at position number 7 and this is universal digital input 5 which goes to our fuel composition sensor so we'll get this under our overhead camera here and we can go to position 7, this one here is 10, 9, 8, 7, so we've got that into the correct location there. |
| 03:44 | And for our fuel composition sensor, this will be our signal wire so let's get our fuel composition sensor under our overhead as well and we'll have a look here at the connector itself. |
| 03:57 | And it can be handy here just to have some spare terminals on hand that will be a nice neat fit into there. |
| 04:06 | What we can see straight away is we're not going to be able to get the probe from our multimeter into the connector body, or at least not without doing some damage. |
| 04:14 | However what we can do is just take another one of our terminals and gently insert that temporarily, let's get our multimeter into shot as well and now we can go between our two terminals here and again we've got a tone, showing that we've got continuity. |
| 04:31 | So from here, again, just a process of rinsing and repeating this, working our way through methodically. |
| 04:37 | Now one thing that is important to also understand here is that we do, as you'll recall, have a number of splices for our 5 volt supplies, our sensor 0 volts as well as our 12 volts and those are all hidden in the back of this autosport connector. |
| 04:52 | So when we've got one of these, we want to actually work through our splices sheet in our Google sheet and make sure that for example here, with our 5 volt supplies, we want to make sure that the single 5 volt terminal at our autosport connector has continuity to each of the locations that 5 volts is going to go out to. |
| 05:12 | Let's just get that up into our sheet here and for example here, if we're looking at our sensor 5 volt 0A, we know that that will be on pin 61 in our autosport connector. |
| 05:26 | That will be the 5 volt supply for our throttle position sensor, our manifold absolute pressure sensor and our oil pressure sensor as well so again, really important just to make sure that we check each of those 3 locations to make sure that we do have continuity rather than just checking one and assuming that the other two are sound. |
| 05:45 | That goes for our ground and our 12 volt supplies as well. |
| 05:49 | Alright we've finished with this particular step, so let's move on now. |
