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When it comes to wiring, one of the reliability points is anywhere there's a connection and there's always the argument or debate about soldering versus crimping.
Crimping is generally the preferred method for a variety of reasons, but when you're doing this by hand it's time consuming, particularly when you're doing production runs.
So we're here with Ryan from Powertune to talk about a couple of pieces of equipment to simplify this task, make it far quicker and, most importantly, much more reliable and consistent.
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For a start, ryan, let's talk about the hand method.
So we're making an adaptable harness, which is what you're talking about here.
Doing it by hand is absolutely viable.
Where are the downsides to doing?
that.
So basically, when you start to scale, and any modern sort of motor vehicle typically has like around 180 to 190 pins on the ECU, so that's quite a lot of hand soldering and crimping for an individual to do.
And then comes into the potential for errors creeping in.
Maybe the crimp isn't quite right.
So how much of a problem is that?
I mean, we always sort of talk about the benefits of crimping, but of course, when we say that the crimp is superior, we are expecting here a quality crimp using the right materials and the right crimper tools.
So where do the problems creep in?
So typically you may have operator fatigue.
That's one thing.
We can have tooling errors, tooling that deteriorates over time.
There can be all sorts of little mistakes that creep into an individual's work.
Alright, let's look at the alternatives and what powertuner using here for production runs.
So you've got two pieces of equipment behind you here.
Let's start by talking about the measure and strip tool.
So I mean there's a hint in its name.
Talk us through what it actually does.
So basically the machine will take a wire from a roll and we can program into it how many pieces of that wire, whatever length we want and whatever strip method we want on that piece of wire, and we can hit, go and the machine will literally do it all for us and spit out at the other end, say, 196 wires stripped at one end and not stripped at the other.
Also literally in seconds.
Correct, Absolutely.
We'll give you a demonstration very shortly.
And doing this by hand.
I mean most people could understand that.
Measuring this out accurately and then stripping each one even with a quality motorsport grave wire stripper, it's gonna take a hell of a lot longer than this machine can do it, and time, of course, is money.
Let's also talk about the stripping technique for tefsel wire, which is what you're using here.
It's the sort of go to wire for a professional motorsport quality harness.
What are the complexities around stripping the insulation off that wire?
So with a traditional PVC type insulation, you'll find a lot of the crimpers actually clamp down on the PVC and pull each direction and that will actually just snap the insulation apart and that'll provide your strip.
Now, with the tefsel wire, you can't do that because the tefsel is basically a material that won't stretch and break like that.
So what we need to do is we actually need to cut that without cutting the conductor, and then pull that away from the existing insulation.
Yeah, so that's where the danger comes in, and we see a lot of people who are used to working with lower grades of wire.
And I cringe when I see people using a set of side cutters to strip insulation almost impossible to do that with tefsel cleanly, neatly at least, without damaging the underlying conductors, and often that can go unnoticed, correct?
That's exactly right, and the last thing that you want to do is make a loom, send it out to a customer.
They put the car on the dyno, plug the loom in and all of a sudden the cars are still under down and they don't know why.
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Alright, so at this point we've got our 196 stripped wires.
Obviously, then we need to add a crimp to that or a terminal to that, so that's the second piece of equipment here.
So talk us through how that works.
So basically, that machine here will strip an unterminated piece of wire.
It will take the strip, it will then apply the terminal that you want whether it be a DTM or, more commonly, a Super Seal connector and it will actually crimp that to millimeter perfect or 0.01
of a millimeter around the wire and create basically a perfect crimp.
So you've got a guaranteed result every time and also again, in an absolute fraction of the time that it would take to manually do this.
Yeah, that's exactly right and, like you said, repeatable, every single time.
There's no fatigue, the machine doesn't get tired.
Let's just come back one step though, because when you're talking about that first piece of equipment, you mentioned sort of partially stripping, and you also mentioned solder.
At the start I did mention that solder and crimping there's always a bit of sort of debate as to which is superior, but in some areas solder is absolutely the only option.
So when you mention solder, why is that important when you're making these adapter harnesses?
So typically with the factory header end of the adapter, we'll find that there's no option other than to solder a physical wire onto the pins that are on that header.
There's no way to really crimp nicely, so it's got a necessity at that point.
One of the problems when we solder, even with the best possible technique, is we'll get soldered and we'll be looking up the wire and it's really the end where that solder finishes.
That can work hard and fail if it's exposed to vibration and movement over time.
What are you doing to mitigate that potential failure?
point.
So on some of our lower quantity looms we basically put a 3D printed enclosure around the back of the case and then we will pot that connector up to a certain height on the wire which provides that stress relief around the solder.
Alright, thanks for giving us some insight into this.
Obviously, it's not equipment that the average home enthusiast is going to be able to justify, but also just interesting to see the techniques that are available at the professional level.
So thanks for your time there.
Absolutely not a problem, thanks.
Andre.
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