Main wiring harness

A

ALD

Well-known member
I have had an electrical fire on my vstar 1100 & the main wiring harness needs to be replaced as part of it got burnt.
I already have another harness that I got from a motorcycle wrecker & a few of the smaller connections need to be swapped from my other harness & then spliced onto the harness from the wrecker.
I would like to know what good conectors that can be used.

Thank you
 
Given that you have a "donor harness", do you actually need any of the OEM connectors? Or are you just planning to cut off or cut out the burnt part and join the wires together (non-OEM), and that's what you are asking about?

If the harness that you bought is complete, why not swap it over complete, and avoid any of the potential headaches from splicing? Yes, you'll have to take a lot of the bike apart to do it, but that's what winter is for.
 
Brian P said:
Given that you have a "donor harness", do you actually need any of the OEM connectors? Or are you just planning to cut off or cut out the burnt part and join the wires together (non-OEM), and that's what you are asking about?

If the harness that you bought is complete, why not swap it over complete, and avoid any of the potential headaches from splicing? Yes, you'll have to take a lot of the bike apart to do it, but that's what winter is for.
Click to expand...
I prefer to stay with oem it's just that a few of the small spade conectors that is on the donor harness is not in good shape & there are some wires exposed.
The same conectors that is on my other harness are in much better shape & what I plan on doing is to cut off the bad conector from the donor harness & splice the newer one on from the other harness.
Would like to know what good conectors I can use cause once this is done & sealed I do not want there to be another problem in the future.
 
OK so you are not actually looking for OEM connectors, you're looking for how best to splice wires together within the harness.

Make sure you do your cuts to wires in a way that gives you enough length, preferably a little more, and do them in places where they're not going to be exposed to repeated bending any more than necessary.

Solder, heat-shrink, electrical tape over the completed harness. Right?

 
Brian P said:
OK so you are not actually looking for OEM connectors, you're looking for how best to splice wires together within the harness.

Make sure you do your cuts to wires in a way that gives you enough length, preferably a little more, and do them in places where they're not going to be exposed to repeated bending any more than necessary.

Solder, heat-shrink, electrical tape over the completed harness. Right?

Click to expand...
I would add that using heat shrink with interior glue is strongly recommended. Helps keeps the green death out of the splice.

I would be trying to clean up the connectors on the donor harness. I prefer that approach to hacking up a harness. If they are in really bad shape, check the wire. If the green death has spread, I would try to cut back to clean copper and make the splice there.
 
The info over in a recent thread may be of interest:
www.gtamotorcycle.com

Resources for Electrical Knowledge, Connectors, Tools etc.

I’m working on re terminating connections on new turn signals and tail light to an aftermarket loom that goes to the back. Basically I spent good money for a kit with spade and bullet connectors on Amazon that came with a crimp, and the tool has a tendency to chew up terminals and some of them...
www.gtamotorcycle.com www.gtamotorcycle.com

If you're talking about those multi-pin OEM connectors and you want to get really fancy and avoid splices, you can de-pin the individual metal terminals from the plastic connectors with specialized tools. This would allow you to better clean the terminals if they're still salvageable, then re-insert them into the plastic connector.

Alternately, you could de-pin the terminals from the connector, cut off the bad ones, crimp on new terminal pins of the same type, and re-assemble them into the plastic connector. This requires more tools and knowledge (especially knowing exactly what type of terminal pins you need and what crimper to use for them). Cutting off the old pins and crimping on new ones will shorten the harness by about a centimetre or so, which may or may not be a problem depending on how much slack you've got. But at the end of the process you'd have a near-factory harness without splices.
 
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You can usually "de-pin" connectors with a very small screwdriver. Done it many times and I don't have any special tools.
 
Depends on the connector. I've got some round ones that screwdrivers just tend to mangle
 
Sorry. Yes mainly I'm talking spade type.
 
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GreyGhost said:
I would add that using heat shrink with interior glue is strongly recommended. Helps keeps the green death out of the splice.

I would be trying to clean up the connectors on the donor harness. I prefer that approach to hacking up a harness. If they are in really bad shape, check the wire. If the green death has spread, I would try to cut back to clean copper and make the splice there.
Click to expand...
Yeh
That's my plan to splice a few wires within the harness & to swap the conectors from one harness to the other.
I also had seen on YouTube that people have used open barrel conectors to splice wires together & then added heat shrink over it.
And also seen on YouTube by soldering wires together can lead to a fail down the road due to vibration & the solder cracking.
Tried attaching a couple pics but kept getting errors telling me that the file is to large & just taking a small image with only two conectors.
Also was adjusting the pixel size & it made no difference.
The conectors I am dealing with are the small spade type with a plastic shield over them.
The ones from the donor harness have bare wires exposed right by the conector with a loose plastic shield that basically slides down the wire & the ones that are from the bike are in much better shape.
 
Depending on the connector I have been known to cut out the conns and just hardwire (solder) them.
 
ALD said:
Yeh
That's my plan to splice a few wires within the harness & to swap the conectors from one harness to the other.
I also had seen on YouTube that people have used open barrel conectors to splice wires together & then added heat shrink over it.
And also seen on YouTube by soldering wires together can lead to a fail down the road due to vibration & the solder cracking.
Tried attaching a couple pics but kept getting errors telling me that the file is to large & just taking a small image with only two conectors.
Also was adjusting the pixel size & it made no difference.
The conectors I am dealing with are the small spade type with a plastic shield over them.
The ones from the donor harness have bare wires exposed right by the conector with a loose plastic shield that basically slides down the wire & the ones that are from the bike are in much better shape.
Click to expand...
Adhesive lined heat shrink acts as strain relief and that should help soldered joints avoid cracking. For a flying splice without support, I sometimes put two layers of heat shrink over with the top layer being longer to provide more support/strain relief.

GTAM doesn't like to host pics. Use something like imgbb. It is free and gives you a link you can put in your post to embed the picture. That moves hosting bandwidth to imgbb instead of gtam (saves on costs).
 
The possibility of vibration + solder cracking is why it's best, when possible, to strategically locate the splice in a part of the harness that isn't subject to vibration, bending, or flexing as part of normal operation (e.g. handlebar switch connections). If there's no flexing, it can't break from fatigue.
 
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