Thread: TD5 Injector Loom cheap fix once and for all

just to be the nay sayer....

I dont think this will be a permanant solution and will eventually fail in the same way as it did before. It will provide a huge delay in the problem recurring tho.

Inspired by mousie I had a go this afternoon. One thing I noticed was that there is a hard black plastic plate over the pins as you can see in Mousie's picture. This is brittle and easily broken off . Underneath that is a soft rubber seal around the pins that with enough wiggling can be lifted up out of the socket to expose more of the pins and clean underneath. See attached pic. I used white spirit then meths to clean - harness is now in the airing cupboard...

I think using resin to seal the top is a good plan (wouldn't have got this far if I didn't) but am open to ideas about whether to cut away the rubber seal and simply fill the entire socket with resin (would Araldite work?) or put a blob of RTV hi temp sealant under the soft rubber, press it back in and then resin on the top a la mousie...

Hi All
I did something similar a few years back so far i have not had a recurrence I used silicon instead of resin. I posted some pic's at the time they can be seen in the AULRO Gallery @. Message - AULRO Photo Gallery
Regards
Doug

Sounds great. As a final suggestion, if my memory serves me well the pins in the connector are hollow. This is how the oil travels in the loom as once inside the pins it can wick through the wire strands.

If you soldered the tips of the pins this would stop the oil ingress. Fiddly I know but goes a long way to stop this issue.

BTW I haven't done this as I replaced the loom a couple of years ago with the new loom. Haven't had trouble yet. I did however keep the old loom incase. Both the injector and main harness!

Regards

If the wiring takes up the oil (wicking) then you will have buckleys of soldering it.

You would be best doing this to a new loom I would think, both soldering and the epoxy.

Dave the right epoxy will work but without the soldering there is still a possability of it wicking thus stuffing the connection anyway.

Once the oil is inside the wires there is no way of getting it out.

1ml of oil in a wire will travel a good 3 or 4 metres and contaminate it causing resistance at connections and creating resistance in the wire.

As a check before doing this would be to check the resistance of the cable and try soldering it and if it turns black then chuck it and buy a new one as the oil will provide dry joints and cause more of the problems you have already.

I recon probably 1 in 5 will get away with it so I recon it would be well worth trying

I don't think the pins are hollow. If you look at the attached pics the male pins are solid where they will fit into the engine harness female connectors. There is a gap where they protrude out of the plastic visible in the pic. I think from those gaps, hole no 3 and around the rim of the plastic base plate oil seeps through and from that point capillary action takes it down the wires to the ECU. In the absence of suggestions I used what I thought was quite a big blob of RTV sealant under the rubber. Pushing it back in there was very little pushed out so I think there is quite a cavity under the seal and that is where the oil is pooling. Next step will be to decide RTV above or resin...

To update. Filled the injector harness socket with resin. Used Araldite we'll see how it holds up. With further fiddling I have also found the female socket on the engine harness also has the same rubber seal and a cavity full of oil (see pic). I have given it a good clean and have actually left the rubber seal out even though I have connected the socket to the plug for now - let it air a bit! I have oil on one pin at the ECU though I'll see if it starts tomorrow and how it goes!

here is my post on dissection of a loom sealed with blue rtv im guessing ~100k km ago, that was now playing up big time:
http://www.aulro.com/afvb/showthread...23#post1818623