"interesting" Harness repair...
 

Someone actually thought this was safe....

http://i71.photobucket.com/albums/i1...06/photo-3.jpg

http://i71.photobucket.com/albums/i1...006/photo5.jpg

There was 6-8 of these wires Soldered to this one line and wrapped in 2 miles of electrical tape....

Well at least they used solder.

That one's fully FAA approved!

I still have no idea what the wires were going to or why they were bound in such a manner.... The car had run with this harness in place...

either thats the 12V supply spider or common ground - but in any case its goofy.

FZZTTT - FIRE,

Im planning to polish my harness building skills again - with my E300D. Im seeing a short in the 4 wire thermosensor and yet the wire harness is dated 2006.

If memory serves it was a power line. Not sure what or why. I did not see this cfg on the replacement harness

That repair is completely wrong according to the Bubba Smith Weekend Engineers' Repair Klub, (BSWERK, Inc.) for a couple of reasons:

A. Someone SOLDERED the repair. Remember guys, hot soldering irons and excessive alcohol doesn't mix! Booze and large flaming bonfires, sure, but soldering irons? Someone could get hurt or spill a drink.

The authorized method is to strip back about 6 inches of insulation, poke the smaller wire through the strands of the larger wire, mangle it all together to create a sort of connection and wrap with aluminum foil, preferably the liner from either your "chaw" package, cigarette pack or the shiny label from your liquor bottle. Tie a shop rag around the splice loosely and hold the wire away from the engine using a bit of metal baling wire. Be sure to twist the wire tightly so it embeds itself into the shop towel and attach it to a metal part of the engine near the exhaust manifolds. Fuel lines make an excellent choice.
:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:

^^ your post is a sure recipe for FIRE. :D

It all depends on the load. If the wires are powering a big add-on stereo amplifier or a rackfull of driving lights, then the current drain could cause a problem. OTOH, light loads or loads that are only turned on one at a time may not cause a problem. The real problem is that you couldn't tell what the wires were for. The good thing is that you were sharp enough to spot and remove the offending octopus before it could cause any damage.

Jeremy

As long as the total current load of all those little wires can be handled by the bigger one.. in theory it's fine, assuming there was an appropriate fuse attached. But I agree it doesn't look right and I too would rip it all out and repair it properly.

Soldering and heat shrink are the way to go. Maybe even environmental heat shrink, it has "goo" that oozes out the ends when heated that seals it all up. I also prefer using environmental butt connectors and such.

Believe it or not.. even in a war zone we would fixed battle damaged aircraft wiring properly. And if getting shot at you flip the switch that dumps all the sensitive info on the computers/radios and have the aircraft blown up with explosives. So long story short... that wiring "repair" you have there sucks ;)

this was the injection harness... so what exactly it powered I have no idea...

I thought it might have been the injection + line. Other than the Mickey Mouse way of doing it there was no big problem. The + line doesn't really do anything. The injectors are switched by the "ground/earth" line. It should be on a 10 amp or less fuse so there was no real fire danger. The fuse would have blown long before those 20 gauge wires got hot.

was it a work around for a bad harness?

if it was I cant see why, There was so much crap Broken off it's amazing the car started and idled well, I would estimate that 20% of the wires were frayed or broken off or just plain missing.