Larisa "1982 Lincoln Continental Mark VI Bill Blass 2-Door

[tjc78]

Friends don't let friends use Vampire (t) taps. No, no, no and no again. Solder snd heat shrink or at the very least really good butt splices.

[DerekTheGreat]

Yeah, those must be the same things I've seen on aftermarket alarm installs and stuff. Ripped the one on Ashley's TC out. Hate those things, they still pierce the insulation... I'm actually hankering to drive something else. I like the TC but am looking at Fox Thunderturds and V6 SN95 Ruststangs and such. Maybe even a TBI 350 powered Cadillac Brougham d'Elegance or Mark VII too.

[sly]

+1 no T taps. I replaced a good dozen on that Mark VI I had. It worked much better after I did too. They were ALL on the engine harness too.

[MattsLincoln]

+1 no T taps. I replaced a good dozen on that Mark VI I had. It worked much better after I did too. They were ALL on the engine harness too.

I cant solder for crap, i have been very successful using insulated butt connectors and quick splices

[His Royal Ghostliness]

Fawk T-taps (vampires), they not only destroy the insulation and thus open the wires for corrosion (yes, even inside the body) but also can cut some of the strands on the factory wire thus essentially reducing its ampacity. If you wanna spend good money they make the "posi-tap" setup which is much better in both areas, if you wanna do it on the cheap side use waterproof (heat-shrink pre-applied) butt connectors - either way gets the job done well, just one is easily removable/reversible while the other one is not. On my junk I go with the waterproof connectors cause I know how to crimp them right so they never come apart, and on other people's stuff I will do either depending on what they wanna spend. But no T-taps, ever!

Btw Matt, you think you're successful with the insulated butt connectors cause you haven't taken a close look at what condition the wires for say speakers in doors get after a while. If you gonna use butt connectors (nothing wrong with that really) use either the "naked" ones and heat-shrink over them to seal crap out, or just go with the waterproof ones. Those insulated ones with the open ends, yeah no, they suck almost as bad as the vampires.

[gadget73]

Learn to solder, its not that hard. Start with a good iron though, otherwise you're never going to get it to work. The shit ones aren't hot enough, and if you can't pump enough heat into the joint to flow the solder, its just not going to come out. Add shrink tube over it, ideally the glue-lined stuff for possibly damp areas, and you're golden.

[His Royal Ghostliness]

The issue with soldering is there are many areas (just about anywhere under/behind the dash) where either the iron won't fit or you just can't get the soldering "geometry" of the wires right... If one thinks about it, very few factory connections are actually soldered - I'd venture to say more than 90% of the wiring that ends in some sort of a connector has the respective terminal of said connector just crimped onto the wire end, no solder. So given that, and also how long said crimps remain trouble-free, I see no downside to crimping wires together via butt-connect barrels - well as long as the crimp is good (use the smallest barrel that fits your wires, size-based color-coding be damned) and the connection is nicely sealed.

[gadget73]

I've not had amazing luck with crimp connectors. Works better with proper crimping pliers but the crimp part of wire strippers never does the job worth a damn.

[DerekTheGreat]

Fuck soldering, crimp it and then heat shrink it. I'll never solder wires again after learning how to crimp stuff. Just so messy.

[His Royal Ghostliness]

I've not had amazing luck with crimp connectors. Works better with proper crimping pliers but the crimp part of wire strippers never does the job worth a damn.

True, the combination tools usually have rather lousy crimping jaws. Come to think of it, I've only ever seen two affordable combination tools that both stripped and crimped well. Most of the stuff you get in hardware stores is acceptable at best.

Fuck soldering, crimp it and then heat shrink it. I'll never solder wires again after learning how to crimp stuff. Just so messy.

It's messy if you don't know wtf you're doing. I personally know two people who can solder like a wizzard, but like one of them already said, you gotta have a good iron to begin with. My main issue with soldering is its inconvenience in that it takes a long time and it's not easy to do well in confined spaces (like splitting one or two wires in a 40-wire main body harness shoved in a dark corner of the engine bay with exactly zero slack). At the same rate crimping doesn't exactly work with PCBs, if you ever wanna do something custom with those you gotta be good at soldering...

[His Royal Ghostliness]

And now for the 3rd way of joining wires: split and twist the branches and fold over and heat-shrink with a layer or three NASA actually has like a 100-something page document about different methods of applying this...

[gadget73]

AKA, the Western Union splice. The fact that Nasa is using telegraph repair technology should attest to how good that splice actually is.

[86VickyLX]

And now for the 3rd way of joining wires: split and twist the branches and fold over and heat-shrink with a layer or three NASA actually has like a 100-something page document about different methods of applying this...

I know you love this method! I've seen you do it many many times!

[His Royal Ghostliness]

Have you seen me pull a pickup truck by a 12-awg wire spliced that way? lol

I've actually migrated away from that method to the waterproof butt-connects for applications where convenience matters more than connection quality (like splicing wires that trigger relays) - but I still use it on important stuff like sensors and such.

[DerekTheGreat]

...It's messy if you don't know wtf you're doing. I personally know two people who can solder like a wizzard, but like one of them already said, you gotta have a good iron to begin with. My main issue with soldering is its inconvenience in that it takes a long time and it's not easy to do well in confined spaces (like splitting one or two wires in a 40-wire main body harness shoved in a dark corner of the engine bay with exactly zero slack). At the same rate crimping doesn't exactly work with PCBs, if you ever wanna do something custom with those you gotta be good at soldering...

What is a PCB?

I know what I'm doing, it's what you just mentioned that makes it suck. Last time I soldered was inside a dashboard, the sun was going down and it was 20 degrees outside. Soldering is much easier when you can do it on a bench top with plenty of wire to work with. With crimping there's no heat until you get the heat source out so no chance of fouling your heat shrink tube or burning the wire's insulation.