How to Replace Damaged Wires

So friends, today I just want to show you something fairly basic, we're going to be taking care of some garbage wires, we'll call them garbage wires. What happens is is the outer sheathing breaks off on them, gets dry and brittle. Next thing you know, you've got bare copper showing, it's going to arc out, cause runability issues depending on what the issue is you're dealing with. So we found some bad wires, and I want to show you how to fix them. It's going to be easy peasy, I can do it, you can do it too. As always, if you need any parts, you can always check us out at 1aauto.com. Thanks.

Okay, so we're underneath the hood, we're taking a look at our wires, and we happen to notice that some of the wiring outer sheathing is dry and brittle and cracking, and it's actually just flaking away very easily, leaving exposed wires, which is going to cause runability issues. It could arc out, cause a fire potentially, so we're just going to take care of that real quick. To do that, we need to gauge how far back we need to go with some new wire, so I'm just going to trim this coating out of the way here, get this tape cut just like that.

What happens is if you have an oil leak and the oil drips down onto wires like this, the oil literally just makes everything hard as a rock, even the tape. The tape is dry and cracking and brittle. There we are, get this out of here. It's literally all just breaking right apart right here in my hands. Okay, so I can see, I come back here, the wires are much more flexible as we get in further here. They don't feel like they're dry and breaking, so I'd say we can come back to anywhere over here.

Okay, so we have a good idea of what we're going to need to do here. We're going to need to find wire that's approximately the same gauge as what we're dealing with, all right? So you don't want to use a very thin wire, like you don't want to use three of these little wires here, because obviously these two right here are much larger than this one, and you also don't want to use three large wires, because this one right here is much smaller than the others, so you need to find wires with the gauge that are the same as what you're dealing with. Once you do that, you can continue on to the next step.

All right, so you got a piece of cut wire. You're going to use your strippers. Go just like this, find the size that's the right size for what you're dealing with. We're just going to take off approximately that much right there. Just like that, okay? That exposes the nice wires in there for us. Take your wires, give them a little twist. Do the same for both ends. There. Come on, baby. There we are, we got both wires twisted here.

We're going to start with one of these wires, just come down to where you feel like it's not fragile and breaking anymore. I'm just going to come right down to right about there. Same thing for up over here, just feel around. Pretty much this whole wire up here is pretty fragile, but if you cut too close to this right here, you won't be able to do anything with it, so I'm just going to feel around and see where it feels like I can get right into here. I feel like if I go right here it'll be fine. So there's our garbage piece of wire that we're going to replace. Got a new piece of wire. You can cut this down to the right size, or the same size if you want, or you can just make it a little bit longer. I'm going to make this one just a teeny bit longer, because once I put in those other little pieces, I'm going to need to probably bend this a little bit.

So now what we'll do, take our connector things here. There we are. Cool. Leave that like that. Okay, so we've got our little connector here, and this just has a piece of metal, and then it's got this plastic protective area that goes over it. So what we're going to do, we're going to take our wire, we're going to twist the connector as we go over the wires, until it goes in as far as it can go. Once it's in, use these, and we're just going to crimp it down. I'll show you right where I'm crimping in one second.

You just want to make sure you give it a good crimp, so that there's no way it can come apart. So you can see where I crimped, I went right on the metal. I didn't go directly on the very, very edge of it, but I went pretty darn close. All right, if I went all the way down towards the center, which is where that little dot is, there's pretty good odds you'd be catching just on the edge or the end of your wire in there, okay? So if you catch just on the end, it might want to pull right out. We'll give it a nice little tug. That feels pretty decent. We'll grab our piece of wire that we're going to use. We're going to do the same exact thing. Just twist it as you put it in, should want to go right in. There we are. Give it a nice tug. That's going nowhere.

Now, something you need to think about is moisture. Moisture can get inside, right in-between the wire and the connector, and it's going to cause an issue. So what you need to have is some kind of heat-shrink, something that'll slide right over this, you heat it up, it shrinks down, and it's going to prevent moisture from getting in here. We'll grab some of that, we'll move along. So we grabbed ourselves a little bit of heat-shrink here. This is all it is, just this flexible little tubing essentially, and what you do, you're going to slide it over your wire, once you figure out what length you need. So we'll say we're going to go all the way down to here with it, and we're going to go all the way up to, I don't know, right about there with it.

We'll cut ourselves that piece. Slide this right over our wire. I can feel it right in-between my fingers there, so I know I've got plenty hanging off this side, and plenty hanging off this side. Just going to use our little mini torch. Just go ahead and melt it down. You don't need to spend very much time in one spot with this. Once it appears like it's starting to melt down, just keep on moving. Could have went a little bit shorter with this, but that's okay. It's better to have a little extra that not enough. There we are. There's that one, easy peasy.

All right, so we're just going to grab the other end of the wire here, do that. I've already got this end all set. Something you need to think about before you go ahead and put a butt connector on here and have it ready to go, is we're going to need heat-shrink. How are you going to get heat-shrink on here once you get this all connected? You're going to cut it back apart, replace your connector, put on the heat-shrink and then do it all over again, or you can just think about it ahead of time and put on a little heat-shrink now. So that's what I'm going to do. Grab my little connector here. Slide this right over the wire so it's happy and waiting for me, nice and far out of the way. Now you can start this with whichever side you want. I'm just twisting as I push, the wire's going to slide right in there, just like that. Crimp it down just like before.

All right, so we'll just get this right on this wire like this. Okay. Got our connector, bring it down to right where we're going to squeeze. Crimp it down nice. Give it our tug. Oh yeah, going nowhere, love it. Heat-shrink, bring it right down, give it a feel, make sure you're approximately in the center of your heat-shrink, or at least the fact that you have some hanging off of both sides. Just melt this down. If it looks like it's gonna melt a little bit more, just give it a little bit more. Just keep moving with your heat, don't stay in one spot for too, too long. We don't want to be catching anything on fire, it's not about that. Of course once you heat it up, it will be a little warm.

So there it is. That's pretty much it in a nutshell. Essentially something that you'd want to think about though is when you do these normally and you cut wires, you'd want to stagger them, where the connectors are going to go. So if the connector's here on this wire, the next one should have the connector up here, and then the next one should be either further up or further down. But with where we're dealing with a very limited space type of circumstance where we have to cut all the way up here for all these wires, we really don't have anything for an option, we're just going to have to go ahead and suck it up, and just cut it straight along here. And I know people are going to be like, "Oh, you didn't stagger them," but I'm just letting you know I couldn't, I have to cut it right here, I have to cut this one right here. It just is what it is, okay? So now that we've got this one in here, all we're going to do is continue on doing the other two the exact same way.

So we're just going to use a little bit of electrical tape. Just going to go right up along the connector itself first, maybe do a couple good passes here. I'm being careful not to get up onto this, because obviously I need that to function properly. Now that I got it up over that a couple times, I'm just going to go down to the wires. And all we're going to do now is just wrap all these wires right next to each other. On to the next step.

So now that we've got this all nice and taped up, it looks real good, we're going to use a little bit of wire loom. This just has a little slit in it and it slides right over your wires. Just like that. This one just happens to be the perfect size. Now we'll just throw a little bit of tape on there to make sure it doesn't come off as it gets moved around and whatnot. This is just added protection. Do you need it? No, you probably don't really need it need it, but it's a good idea to have it. Volvo obviously put some on there, so there must be a reason for that.

You don't need to use your tape all the way up it if you don't want to, you just put a couple strips here, couple strips there, whatever, but it really doesn't take that much extra time just to go ahead and do the whole thing, and it's just going to add extra protection. Just bring it all the way up here. Oh yeah. That's beautiful. Maybe I'll get a job at Volvo. There we are. Put that down like that, bring this around. We're just going to slide this right in, it's going to click. There it is. Put this down and in there like that. That looks very nice. Now if your engine has covers over it like this one does, you would go ahead and put your covers back on.

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