Slow Monster rebuild

[Luddite]

Nice to see slob's wiring diagrams on the wall!

Are you using econoseal\superseal terminals like these?



If so, this is the crimper you need:



https://www.3waycomponents.co.uk/Wir...noseal-MEB-300

I have a spare crimper that you're welcome to. If you PM me your address, I'll post it to you this afternoon, no charge.

Note that, if you need any wiring parts, this place gives 10% discount for UKMOC members.

http://www.ukmonster.co.uk/monster/s...ad.php?t=54558

[utopia]

I have a crimper which works for Superseal-type connectors (though I had to grind it first) ... but I find that when put to a strenuous test, sometimes the crimping isn't good enough.
I now crimp AND solder them .. but its tricky.
I have one of those cheap electric soldering irons with interchangeable bits and I modified the tip of one of the spare bits into a very narrow (about 2mm dia) "prong", about 6mm long.
This then allows just the right amount of heat to be applied and, if you lay it across the terminal, leaves access to feed in the solder.
You do have to be very neat though, or else the terminals wont fit the housings .. although its easy enough to scrape off excess solder with a stanley blade.

I loosely clamp the terminal assembly (usually via the wire) to a plywood board to hold it still while soldering.
I use a rubber pad to avoid heat transfer through the clamp distorting the insulation.

What do you plan to cover the harness in ?
I used shrinkwrap for the minor runs, eg to indicators etc but for the main central body of the loom it makes everything far too stiff.
I got on very well using non-adhesive, pvc tape for the main section.
It grips to itself pretty tightly despite having no adhesive and gives a nice neat and reasonably tight binding while still retaining excellent flexibility.

Also, tbh, since you're going to so much trouble with the loom, I would give up on colour-coding your own wires and buy some in the appropriate colours.

And, I guess you're already on to this but the accepted wisdom seems to be that the alternator wires should be beefed up a bit.

[350TSS]

Luddite: yes those are the crimp connections – AMP type
I have a crimper similar to the one shown but it is a cheap and nasty one only useful for those horrible aluminium pre-insulated connectors.
I have sent you a PM. Many thanks for your kind offer– I was genuinely fearful of trying to wire the multiple connectors (e.g. 6 way) and managing 4 or five and then failing on one or two and then having to shorten the lead and do it all over again (and again).

Incidentally, what a good site 3 Way Components is and they sell the proper (pukka) connector boots which finish the job off nicely. Downside is that I have already finished 3 x 2 way connectors for neutral switch, rear brake light switch and fuel sender and am now debating whether I should undo them and re-do them with a good crimper and with pukka boots.
As I write this I have had a very short debate with myself and I will definitely re-do them as I am uncomfortable with the quality/security of the crimp (multiple mangulations with snipe nosed pliers) and also the flying leads from the neutral switch, hydraulic pressure switch and the tank sender will be long enough to withstand a slightly shorter loom feed.

Utopia: I too am of the belt and braces school, I have never really trusted crimped alone connections especially on a motorbike (far too much experience of buying second hand bikes and discovering those horrible blue aluminium connections (usually bullets) which always seem to part at 2.00am on a frosty morning leaving you with no lights).
I have on my loom design (still emerging) about 12 places where I have common feeds that go in multiple directions. I ordered some fancy pre-soldered connection pieces contained in a clear heat shrink (working I think much like a pre-soldered copper plumbing fitting). Strip the ends to be joined, twist the wires together and slide over the pre-soldered sleeve, apply heat and watch the solder melt – job done - so the advertising blurb said anyway. Unfortunately, these have not arrived yet.
In their absence and in the interests of making some progress I did solder the junctions for the indicator leads today. Technique was to determine main feed wire and cut it to length, then using a Stanley knife at 90 degrees to the insulation score the insulation to the core wires in two places about 10mm apart where the join was to be made and then carefully split the insulation leaving a 10mm bare wire patch on the main feed. The end of the wire to be joined was stripped for 15mm and twisted round the bare main feed wire. The joining lead was taped parallel to the main feed for about 25mm and the bare portion then soldered and electrically taped, finally a heat shrink sleeve was put over the whole joint say 35mm long.
As for soldering the amp connections as well as crimping I tried that and it seemed to create nearly as many problems with the metallic bit fitting inside the plastic bit as the botched crimping. I will wait and see if Luddites crimper does an ace job in which case I will not bother. What I will do if it does just an OK job I do not know? Operator error/cackhandedness will probably account for any difference here.
As to wrapping the loom, I had not considered non-sticky tape and will need to research this, I think that it will definitely make the loom more flexible which will be very important around the steering head. A great benefit also is that it can be applied after the loom is made – see below.

[350TSS]

Cont:
As I have built the loom I have been, probably erroneously, sticky taping two or three wires running the same route about every 100 mm (so to the tail light assembly there are 3 bundles of 2 wires individually taped and taped together). I had originally intended to wrap the whole loom in a form of a nylon mesh stocking made specifically for wrapping looms, but it does not, at least at the first attempt, work very well with shrink wrap. The mesh has a lower melting point than the shrink wrap and I ended up with a stick molten mess that had to be cut off. Also, when making the connectors for the neutral, tank sender and rear brake light switch I forgot to put the mesh on first, when I re-make these connections I will try to use it again, being a bit more circumspect with the hot air gun.
I have bought some yellow alternator leads in heavier duty cable and a higher ampere rated connector between it and the regulator, I do not know yet whether this HD cable will go through the gland into the alternator case and whether or not the gland will continue to keep the slippery stuff inside the casing.

[utopia]

I get your point about the solder interfering with assembling the terminals into the housings .. but I find that with care, and the occasional scrape, I have no problems as long as I'm not over-enthusiastic with applying the solder.

Of major importance (and I'm sorry I didn't mention it before) ....steer well clear of modern solders containing zinc. They are total rubbish (as you probably already know).
Use only good old-fashioned lead:tin stuff.
Chalk and cheese.

Oh, and while I'm at it .. I use thin, flux-cored solder wire.
The terminals are already tinned and the solder will flow readily into them.
But I'm careful to clean off the residual flux afterwards with meths, to prevent corrosion.

[350TSS]

Utopia: my large roll of solder came out of the arc (bought it when I was building a car in 1982/4) so I am pretty sure it is unadulterated with zinc.
Did not know about cleaning off the flux though, pretty obvious if you think about it the flux must contain some sort of acidic compound to get rid of the oxides. I tend to use fluxite, (brown grease look-a-like in a tin slightly smaller than shoe polish) together with the multicore so I am probably compounding the problem.
I could not make progress with the wiring loom today (or use the crimpers supplied by Luddite (thanks again)) as all the work I need to do requires connection of the 2, 3, 4 and 6 way connectors and I am waiting delivery of the boots.

I decided therefore to make the S2 rear axle blocks fit the M900 swinging arm. I have to remove about 0.5mm from the width and about 1.7mm from the depth. The “about” descriptor arises from the fact that this is the measured difference between the new (SH) S2 blocks and the original M900 blocks but the difficulty in being precise arises from the fact that the M900 blocks only “fit” the M900 swinging arm where they touch. The lateral movement means that as manufactured the M900 swinging arm extrusion has to be “crushed” about 0.2 to 0.5mm when the axle is tightened which cannot be good. The ends of the swinging arm itself are not rectangular but very slightly waisted where the wheel has been tightened previously.

The problem I had was how to remove material and keep it both square and exactly the same as between the two blocks? The chances of my filing it and retaining squareness were judged slim, I do not possess a milling machine and would not know how to use it if I did.

I do possess a machine vice and a pillar drill with a ground table (with slots for bolting a machine vice to it) that can be raised and lowered on a reasonably precise but uncalibrated rack gear. My solution was to clamp the S2 blocks in the machine vice and bolt the machine vice to the table so that I was just able to push/slide it across the table. I then removed the drill from a hole saw and used the circular cutter part to “mill” the surface of the block, measuring frequently.
It did not work, the teeth on the cutter were too coarse and not flat enough with the face of the block - it grabbed the workpiece. So careful filing it was (counting an equal number strokes on each face and measuring regularly) and after an hour and a half I had two blocks that fitted the (already pre-crushed) swinging arm much tighter than the original M900 version.

The rest of the afternoon was spent making a conical aluminium spacer to replace the one that fits between the chain side rear wheel bearing and the swinging arm. When I got back to the house the boots had arrived so that is what I shall be playing with tomorrow.

[350TSS]

Below are pictures of axle blocks, now lightened, including a 3mm end to end hole in the 8mm adjuster bolt, and the new alloy bearing spacer.
The second and third picture are a little puzzling??? The 25mm hole in the block that fits inside the swinging arm is approximately central to the 17mm hole in the swinging arm, as you would expect, however the steel outside adjuster plate is about 4 to 5mm south of being central. I have S2 and S4 adjuster plates to hand and they are both the same. More work, straightening and re-bending those plates or more likely remaking them from scratch.

[350TSS]

[350TSS]

I had a thoroughly disheartening 4 hours in the garage today, failing to fit a single AMP connector not, I hasten to add, for the want of trying.

To date I have struggled to fit 3 x 2 pole female connectors (without boots all of which arrived yesterday). My plan for today was to remove these and fit the boots and re-fit them and then make the male connectors (2 x 6 pole) for the wires from the instrumentation.

In the female AMP connectors, the tinned sockets finish up more or less flush with the face of the plastic body of the connector, in the male, the pins are sunk about 25 mm within the connector body which makes it absolutely impossible to see what is going on.

The problem I was having was that when crimped the tinned connector components (M and F) would not push in and lock into their respective plastic bodies. The hole in the plastic for the female connector is about 1.5mm square and for the male pin about 1mm x 0.7mm. Despite the crimpers supplied by Luddite, I simply could not make the finished crimp fit within these dimensions.

I thought initially that the overlap on the crimp portion of the connector itself was too big, not allowing the crimped bit to compress into the available space so I tried trimming the tinned bits down with kitchen scissors before attempting to crimp them – no joy.
There is also a difficulty particularly with the male pins in making sure the crimping takes place so that there is no imposed twist on the cable in order to allow it to fit within the plastic bit of the connector.

My ham-fistedness coupled with my close-range vision being not as good as it was obviously does not help, however to fit inside the plastic bits the male and the female tinned components have to end up with completely parallel sides after crimping. All hand-held plier type crimpers obviously have to have a depression to crimp into and have a bathtub shaped profile because the jaws are working on an arc around the pivot of the pliers (otherwise the pliers would not close and release).

I am determined to make these AMP connectors fit on my build (I am out well over a ton on connectors, boots and cable). They are elegantly designed and obviously will be completely moisture resistant when assembled correctly and booted up they just look nice and professional. It is just a huge pity they are such a bugger to fit.

My thinking now is to make a small press out of some 10mm thick steel but with a means of ensuring the two parts remain square and parallel to each other during the pressing operation.

[Darren69]

Have you tried without tinning the wires, just crimping the bare wire? I don't know but maybe the solder is making the wire too thick for the crimp to close down enough? I don't think you need to for those sealed connectors anyway.

[Dukedesmo]

A well crimped 'crimp' onto bare wires is the best connection.

Some of the ratchet crimp tools are not that great unless very specific to the type of connector (usually very expensive) and even then they don't always close the end part (bit that grips the insulation) properly. I see this with professional cables supplied for my work that sometimes require 'attention'.

Best crimpers I've found (without spending silly money) for superseal are these; https://www.amazon.co.uk/Universal-C.../dp/B002L6HJ8W they do require 2 operations; one for the cable and a second for the insulation as they are too narrow to crimp both together but they make a strong, neat crimp. They also make them in different size ranges but the PA-21 is spot-on for the AMP superseal as used on bikes and many other small connectors.

[Darren69]

I got some AMP superseal dies for my ratchet crimper you just undo the screws and the dies can be changed. Like you say you need to make 2 crimps per connector. They were off ebay but I can't find them or anything like them now. Most of the dedicated AMP Superseal crimpers are 40-50 quid or more, whereas these were just a few quid.

[Darren69]

They look similar to this one:-

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/0-14-1-5m....c100005.m1851

[Luddite]

Sorry those crimpers aren't working out for you. If you think you'll definitely need ratchet crimpers to do the job, there are a couple of options.

I don't know what type you have at the moment but are the jaws removable? If so, you may be able to get some Superseal specific inserts like these:

http://www.sealey.co.uk/PLPageBuilde...ription=ak3858



Alternatively, you could get a dedicated Superseal ratchet, which crimps the wire and insulator in one action, for £35:

https://www.12voltplanet.co.uk/super...ping-tool.html



http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/222243687042

This video shows them in action and is quite a good "how to" guide...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=...&v=adSl73Qjwok

[350TSS]

Thanks guys for all the concern, advice, suggestions etc. I genuinely feel the force is with me.

Situation update, started yesterday on my plan to make a press and spent half an hour looking round for suitable scrap metal, I really wanted 1” x 3/8” bright mild steel with nice machined edges which I knew I had somewhere. When I eventually found it, I had a change of heart realising that making this press was going to take most of the day but more particularly I did not have any steel with nice machined edges the right size for the compressing bit of the tool I had designed in my head.
The previous evening, I scoured the internet for crimping tools for AMP connectors but did not see anything outstandingly better than my ratchet type or Luddite’s version.
My thought process was - other people manage why can’t I? I must be doing something wrong.
Against this was the prospect of having to make about 150 connections and each taking about an hour with about 4 failed attempts before a successful termination was made so a fool-proof tool would pay dividends in the long run.
I thought I would practice on a cable separate from the main loom so any repeated cock ups would not mean replacing cables already cut and attached to the main loom. The speedo hall sensor cable was chosen and I will need 2 x 3 way connectors for this cable (which runs from the back brake hanger plate to the instruments in front of the top yoke), one situated just about where the rear suspension top pivot sits and the other just behind the steering head.
Starting from first principles I examined the connector closely and I discovered there are two possible paths a cable can take when it is introduced into one side of the connector, the easy path and a more difficult path which exerts some slight friction onto the cable sheath. Yesterday, I did not notice this and just pushed the wires in until they popped out the other side, all three, obviously by chance, took the easy path. Yesterday’s efforts were damned from that moment on, as often happens in life the righteous path is the more difficult one.
I was oddly heartened by this and eventually made both sides of the steering head connector within 2 hours with about 6 fails. What I learned was:
1. First make sure the boot is on the cable, any heat shrink you want to use is also present and the tiny little silicone bellows are on each cable – common sense
2. Pass the wires through the right part of the connector – obvious really when you know there are two possible paths
3. Strip the wires after they are installed through the connector – common sense
4. Trim the tinned connector, particularly the tangs that grip the insulation and the tangs next along so that there is going to be no overlap when they are crimped. - hard won experience
5. Pre-condition the shortened tangs on the tinned connector so the stripped wire passes through a tunnel not a channel – hard won experience
6. Align the tinned connector with the square hole it has to be pushed into before crimping so there is no need to twist the cable to get it to enter the plastic connector, particularly important for the female connector and for more than 2 way connectors – common sense
7. If soldering as well as crimping, do not pre- tin the cable end before crimping and use the bare minimum of solder – common sense
8. Dress the final crimped connection for squareness of hole fit and longitudinal alignment with snipe nose pliers – do it sparingly
I can now make a connection successfully in about 5 minutes using Luddite’s crimpers. This will be my next 10 hours bike time – not an enthralling prospect and no real photo opportunities – further report next week