Used Car or Truck Came With Wiring Hackjob How to Clean Up Spliced Wiring Messes

Come on. Jeez.

Hey, friends, it's Len here from 1A Auto. So, you probably saw the video that just came out when I took the plow off the front of this truck. With the plow, came some wiring. I went ahead, I got underneath the hood here, and what did I find? Ugh. Well, it gave me a topic for another video. Now, why would somebody have put all this wiring under their hood for their plow? Of course, the plow was gonna have some electronics to come with it. You're gonna have headlights and some directionals for safety so people know what's going on. You have to go ahead and install one of these wiring harnesses, but the person that did it kind of cut into the original wiring harness of the vehicle itself, and you can tell it's a little bit of a mess. Now, for me personally, I don't technically like to go ahead and cut into any of these wiring harnesses. You could potentially cause damage, especially if moisture made its way in here. By doing something like this, it's definitely not very good for the vehicle overall. And, of course, you could get a short on one of your wires, which could cause a major electrical issue.

Before I start taking off any of this tape, the first thing that I wanna mention is you're gonna wanna make sure that you disconnect your negative battery terminal. Why do you wanna disconnect the negative battery terminal? What if one of these wires was a power wire of some sort, maybe even a constant power wire. If that's the case, you go ahead and you take off whatever's going on here and you ground it out somehow, you could potentially blow a fuse or even cause some damage to your electrical system like I was talking about before. All right. Let's start taking this apart one wire at a time and see exactly what's going on under here. All right. So, what it looks like here is they went ahead and they peeled side some of this outer sheathing. This is the protective layer for the wire. Once they had it peeled away, they went ahead and they took their other wire that leads to the plow harness, wrapped it around, and then they started it on there. Of course, they wrapped it with electrical tape because they wanted it to try to be as waterproof as possible, but overall, it's really not the best. Electrical tape is gonna help keep some moisture out of there, but it won't keep it all out.

Having something like this could potentially cause some corrosion, restriction in your wiring, and like I said before, an electrical problem. What I'm gonna do here is just try to cut off the remaining excess of this wire right here. All right. So, now that I went ahead and trimmed that off, I'm gonna continue on to the rest of these wires. I wanna ensure that there isn't any damage to the wiring that I'm gonna have to fix. So, let's just go ahead and pull all the rest of these off of here. Make sure that all we have to do is just trim off the excess wire that's on there and then we'll recoat them.

All right. So, now that we have all the wires so that the excess wire is trimmed off of them, we're just gonna thoroughly inspect them. Go ahead and give them a nice tug. You wanna make sure that the original wire for the wiring harness is still in good condition. If it seems like it's broken or frayed in any way, you wanna go ahead and try to trim this, and then we're gonna try to splice it together. Luckily for me, all these wires look like they're in very good condition, so I'm just gonna continue on with some liquid electrical tape. We'll let it dry on there so it's nice and waterproof. And then we'll wrap it up with some regular electrical tape and put it inside this nice loom right here to protect it. I wanna make sure that I coat this entire area and I'm even gonna go up the sheathing a little bit. This is just gonna help ensure that no moisture can make its way into this wiring harness.

All right. That's our last wire. Now, commonly, what I like to do with this is I like to let it fully dry. After it fully dries, I'm gonna go ahead and inspect it. If I see any areas that look like they could use another coat, I'll go ahead and coat it. All right. We'll let these dry. Now we're just gonna go ahead and take them and we're gonna try to twist them a little bit. We just wanna make sure that check all sides of each wire, and we wanna make sure that it's completely coated. If it looks like there's an area that you can see some shiny areas or some wires shining through, you wanna make sure that you put it on a second coat. This one looks good, just check them all. And we can continue with some electrical tape. Just go ahead and cut this.

So, now I'm just gonna take some of this electrical tape, and go around, and around, and around each one of these wires if you want to. But I essentially just like to take it, I'll go right in the center of the electrical tape with the wire and then I'll fold it right over on itself. Just like that. So, now at this point, it's completely coated with a liquid electrical tape. And then I just went ahead and I put on some of this electrical tape and that's, of course, to help give it an extra buffer between each one of these wires so we can do each of the wires, and then we'll just electrical tape them all together. Okay. So, I taped up all these wires and I went ahead and I made sure that I pressed down the electrical tape as much as possible around each of these wires. Now, at this point, with them all coated and protected, let's go ahead and tape them up so they're nice to neat. We'll put them inside this sheathing right here.

Okay. I've got the battery reconnected, let's go ahead and test our lights. Wooh, love it. Okay, friends, we got the truck all back together. We took care of that wiring, it works amazingly. I'm confident that I don't have to worry about any moisture making its way into the wiring harness because, of course, somebody spliced it into it for the plow assembly. it's something that's very common. If you see an old plow assembly on an older vehicle, more than likely somebody really tried to splice into it in some way. In this case, of course, they did try to tape it off with a little bit of electrical tape. And yes, they did actually use some soldering, but it wasn't the safest overall for the wiring itself because moisture could have made its way inside and damage the wiring harness.

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