Damaged Connectors How to Splice in New Car Electrical Connectors

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In this video, we're going to be working with our 2006 Chrysler 300. We're going to show you how to repair a damaged or broken electrical connector. Ours was for the headlight because we had these low quality, after market replacement headlights in there which caused the vehicle to pull too much current and actually melt down both headlight connectors. If you like this video, please click subscribe. We have a ton more information on this and many other vehicles, and if you ever need parts for your car, like some high quality replacement headlights, you can follow the link down in the description over to 1AAuto.com. Here are the items you'll need for this repair.

In removing our headlights, we found a burned wiring connector. Having a burned electrical connector like this is very bad as it presents the opportunity for fires. It can get hot, it’s already melted to some degree, and it's possible that it could catch fire. What we're going to do is replace the pigtail on this harness so we can safely and securely reconnect to the headlight bulb in our new headlights.

We're going to take a razor blade and on the end of the wiring loom here you'll see where the seam is, and we're going to very carefully cut through that tape. I'm facing the blade up here, because I don't want to risk cutting into any of the wire harness. Once you've cut through there, go ahead pull out your harness and check the condition. Make sure – now this tape is old so it's kind of breaking away here, but you want to make sure that doesn't look like it's been burned in any way. All of our wiring underneath looks good, so it was a problem with the actual connector that caused this to melt down like that.

Peel all this back so we have plenty of room to work with. Match up your replacement pig tail and connector. They're the same. Now it's very unlikely you're going to get the same color wires on your connector as you do on your factory harness unless you order one from the factory. That's really expensive to just get the same color wiring, where what we can do is we're going to cut one side shorter than the other. This doesn't have to be too drastic, but enough room that the connectors will sit side by side when we crimp them on, and not create a bulge in our harness.

Now what we'll do with our connector tab facing up, like we have here, we will cut the harness on my left side longer. We'll cut the right side of the harness the same length as the other side, shorter. Now our old burned harness is off, we know our longer side goes to our shorter side, and our shorter side goes to the longer side. I actually overshot this just a little bit. I'm going to clean that up so they match up a little closer.

Now we'll strip all four of these wires and get ready to crimp them together. It’s sixteen gauge wire that we're working with here. For reference, the length of the cutting blade is about how long you want to strip the wire. We'll do the same thing on our harness side. It’s actually 18 gauge coming off of our harness. Now we'll take a second to twist together all the strands of our wire. When you're done, you want your wires to be twisted up nice and tight like that.

Now we're going to use a weather proof insulated connector here, or you can make your own. Simply slide the wiring in and crimp it down with your wiring tool. Do the same thing on the other side, remember our long side is connected to our short side, and vice versa. Lay that all the way in and crimp it into place. Then we'll connect our short side to our long side. Make sure that both connections can take a little bit of pulling on them without coming apart, and then we'll use a lighter or a heat gun to heat up the ends and shrink them down to seal the wire. Be sure not to stay in one place for too long because you'll risk melting the wiring which defeats the purpose of what we're trying to do. Now we'll give that a minute to cool.

Now we'll take some electrical tape and recover our wiring where we peeled the tape off of it before. Now, a fast way to do this is if you actually lay the roll of tape out, kind of parallel to the wiring, then just rotate it around. You don't have to grab everything perfectly as long as you just wrap it up to keep it together and give it a little extra layer of protection. We don't want to go too close to the end or you're going to put pressure on the connectors. We'll give it just one more tighter wrap. Push it back into your wire loom.

Now we'll just put a little wrap of tape on the end of the loom to keep it closed and then we'll do one around where the connectors are just because they're a little bulkier than the original wiring. We want to make sure we keep this loom nice and tight so our wires don't chafe. Now our electrical connection is good as new.

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