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Items needed to rebuild your wiring harness's.

Gunfreak25

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Just got done doing a count. For those interested in making their trucks wiring 100% waterproof and brand new looking again. For the GMC M211's you'll need

110' of 14g wire
110 Douglas rubber grommets
110 Douglas bullet terminals
60/40 Rosin core solder
Soldering gun
Wire cutters
Knife or razor blade for stripping wire
Several rolls of 1/4" heat shrink tubing from harbor freight.
A propane torch to heat the shrink tubing.
And of course, reuse the little bushings.
Dialectric grease

After removing the harness to be repaired, first go over each connection and make sure the metal tag is there and is legible. Otherwise replace it with a piece of masking tape. Makes re-installation a BREEZE! Unwrap all of the old brittle electrical tape from the wiring. You'll see the wire is all factory fresh under the tape, unlike the exposed wire which gets brittle and crumbles when touched. Simply cut the wires about 5 inches BACK from where the electrical tape ends.

Strip a little insulation off, solder the new wiring on (always the same length as what you cut off). Apply a little shrink tubing to cover the splice. Remove 1/4" strip of insulation from each wire for the new terminal. I prefer to solder my terminals. Put a few pieces of solder in each terminal, hold it with pliers and heat it up until it melts. Just heat them back up and insert the wire when you want to install them, no special crimping tool necessary.

Before sliding the douglas shells and the steel bushings back on I give them a few hours in a tumbler with polishing media to clean them up. Wire wheel works too, or just set them out on cardboard and spray them with Eastwoods yellow cadmium paint. 1 can will do. Slide the shells and bushings onto each prepared wire, put a little grease on the terminal, slide the rubber grommet on. Done! It's quite time consuming, but you can do it inside on your table while listening to a little country music, I really enjoyed doing all mine.

When your all finished just tape everything back up and it will look and perform like brand new wiring again. The new rubber grommets keep everything 100% water proofed. The cost will be around $150 to redo your entire vehicle. You will usually have several grommets, terminals and some wire leftover for projects and repairs. Compare this to the cost of replacing EVERY foot of wiring on the truck. It would take nearly 500' or more of wire! You can see where the cost savings come into play doing this.
 

Gunfreak25

Well-known member
1,561
620
113
Location
Yuma, AZ
Thanks, I forgot to mention the cannon plugs though. This is where the insulation tends to crumble the most because most of the cannon plugs are exposed to the elements. Don't want shorts here! To disassemble the female plugs (they have sockets instead of pins) you simply unscrew the shell from the rear end of the plug to expose the rubber seal. Spray some WD40 on the wires and remove any crumbling insulation before you begin to pull the rubber seal away from the cannon plug. You'll want to move any metal tags up as far as you can too. Pull the seal up about 5 inches, this will give you enough room to cut a wire and pull it out of the plug. Insert a new piece of wire being sure to put the metal tag on it, then just solder it to the pin/socket. Make sure the area where you've soldered does not stick up and out of the back of the rubber seal. The point is to create a 100% waterproof seal again which won't happen if you just cut the wires and solder on new ones on the outside of the rubber seal. Sort of tricky, but very doable. I have not taken a male plug apart yet but it should be just as easy. Do work with one wire at a time to avoid mixing them up. In the event you mix up metal tags, fixing your screw up is quite easy. In TM-8024 there is a table showing all the tabulations for each cannon plug. It makes screwing up the wiring on a MV very hard to do.
 
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