Field Report: Why is Tefzel wire HARDER to strip?

When it comes to wiring , one of the reliability points is anywhere there's a connection and there's always the argument or debate about soldering versus crimping . Crimping is generally the preferred method for a variety of reasons , but when you're doing this by hand it's time consuming , particularly when you're doing production runs .

that . So basically , when you start to scale , and any modern sort of motor vehicle typically has like around 180 to 190 pins on the ECU , so that's quite a lot of hand soldering and crimping for an individual to do .

And then comes into the potential for errors creeping in . Maybe the crimp isn't quite right . So how much of a problem is that ? I mean , we always sort of talk about the benefits of crimping , but of course , when we say that the crimp is superior , we are expecting here a quality crimp using the right materials and the right crimper tools .

So typically you may have operator fatigue . That's one thing . We can have tooling errors , tooling that deteriorates over time . There can be all sorts of little mistakes that creep into an individual's work .

Alright , let's look at the alternatives and what powertuner using here for production runs . So you've got two pieces of equipment behind you here . Let's start by talking about the measure and strip tool . So I mean there's a hint in its name . Talk us through what it actually does .

So basically the machine will take a wire from a roll and we can program into it how many pieces of that wire , whatever length we want and whatever strip method we want on that piece of wire , and we can hit , go and the machine will literally do it all for us and spit out at the other end , say , 196 wires stripped at one end and not stripped at the

Also literally in seconds .

Correct , Absolutely . We'll give you a demonstration very shortly .

And doing this by hand . I mean most people could understand that . Measuring this out accurately and then stripping each one even with a quality motorsport grave wire stripper , it's gonna take a hell of a lot longer than this machine can do it , and time , of course , is money .

So with a traditional PVC type insulation , you'll find a lot of the crimpers actually clamp down on the PVC and pull each direction and that will actually just snap the insulation apart and that'll provide your strip . Now , with the tefsel wire , you can't do that because the tefsel is basically a material that won't stretch and break like that .

Yeah , so that's where the danger comes in , and we see a lot of people who are used to working with lower grades of wire . And I cringe when I see people using a set of side cutters to strip insulation almost impossible to do that with tefsel cleanly , neatly at least , without damaging the underlying conductors , and often that can go unnoticed , correct ?

That's exactly right , and the last thing that you want to do is make a loom , send it out to a customer . They put the car on the dyno , plug the loom in and all of a sudden the cars are still under down and they don't know why .

Do you want to take your car knowledge game to the next level ? Join us in the next free lesson at hpacademycom . Slash free and start developing your own skills today . Alright , so at this point we've got our 196 stripped wires . Obviously , then we need to add a crimp to that or a terminal to that , so that's the second piece of equipment here .

So basically , that machine here will strip an unterminated piece of wire . It will take the strip , it will then apply the terminal that you want whether it be a DTM or , more commonly , a Super Seal connector and it will actually crimp that to millimeter perfect or 0.01 of a millimeter around the wire and create basically a perfect crimp .

So you've got a guaranteed result every time and also again , in an absolute fraction of the time that it would take to manually do this .

Yeah , that's exactly right and , like you said , repeatable , every single time . There's no fatigue , the machine doesn't get tired .

Let's just come back one step though , because when you're talking about that first piece of equipment , you mentioned sort of partially stripping , and you also mentioned solder . At the start I did mention that solder and crimping there's always a bit of sort of debate as to which is superior , but in some areas solder is absolutely the only option .

So typically with the factory header end of the adapter , we'll find that there's no option other than to solder a physical wire onto the pins that are on that header . There's no way to really crimp nicely , so it's got a necessity at that point .

One of the problems when we solder , even with the best possible technique , is we'll get soldered and we'll be looking up the wire and it's really the end where that solder finishes . That can work hard and fail if it's exposed to vibration and movement over time . What are you doing to mitigate that potential failure ?

point . So on some of our lower quantity looms we basically put a 3D printed enclosure around the back of the case and then we will pot that connector up to a certain height on the wire which provides that stress relief around the solder .

Alright , thanks for giving us some insight into this . Obviously , it's not equipment that the average home enthusiast is going to be able to justify , but also just interesting to see the techniques that are available at the professional level . So thanks for your time there . Absolutely not a problem , thanks .

Andre .

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