Most of my time on this project lately has been spent working on engine harness and engine harness accessories.
Since the ecm has to move out the way of engine mounts, had to find a good way to mount that then make sure the harness would still work (it didn’t, at least not well enough). Since I was in the zone of making ecm mount work, I went down a rabbit hole of making a harness chase kit to complement the ecm mount, keeping everything secure and clean.
In the process of making harness chase kit, I realized how much easier it might be with 6.7L fuel system components. Found some of those and started mocking things up, then realized the intake plate needed to change for that to work. Hunted one of those down and all associated parts for grid heater from an industrial application for what is turning into a pretty tight package.
The harness has been on and off the engine a bunch of times getting lengths figured out, have been de-pinning, re-pinning, breaking, and fixing the painless harness enough that now it’s probably going to just be easier to make a standalone harness from scratch. Still not 100% sure on that, but leaning pretty hard in that direction. There really only are two super frustrating things about the painless harness, everything else is as expected:
1. The cheap crimp connectors they use. They are probably totally fine for 99.9% of installs because nobody is changing anything. If you need to depin anything though, good luck. The depin tool (a small plastic thing) will get caught on the part of the crimp that wraps around the insulation and get absolutely shredded. Typical to go through 3 depin tools PER CONNECTOR, PER DEPIN, which is totally ridiculous. Any pin that comes out gets replaced with a nice machined deutsch barrel connector before going back in. Did lots of testing after putting one of those on, the depin tool can easily remove those over and over again without any damage.
2. They decided to splice wires in the harness in the worst way possible, to save a few cents they splice where a bundle changes direction/splits/randomly/whatever. So for an alternate routing there is a lot of untangling and changing of lengths and new terminals are needed…etc…etc……etc. Giving me headache.
3. Did I mention I don’t like wiring?
Anyways, picture time.
Taking stuff apart
Figuring out lengths
Hopefully this stuff isn’t needed
Making new bits to use different sensors
End of plastic tool after getting it on with one of the sheetmetal crimp on connectors. No longer useful.