- Hey team, Andre from High Performance Academy, welcome along to another one of our webinars
where we're going to be diving this time into the selection of Autosport connectors and we
quite often get asked about this because I know a lot of people do get confused and while the price
point of an Autosport connector is one thing to put people off purchasing them and using them,
first of all actually physically knowing what you need when you're speccing one of these
connectors, this on face value does seem somewhat terrifying and while I'm not going to be able to
show you the numbers on our camera, on the side of every Autosport connector, you're going to
see a range of numbers that does on face value look a little bit daunting.
This one is actually not an Autosport, it's a Souriau one but it's 8STA6-22-55PN.
What the hell does that all mean?
And if you don't understand this, it's obviously going to be pretty difficult to decide what is
going to be right for your application.
I'm just going to go through this process really briefly here and what we'll do is we'll start by
heading across to my laptop screen.
Now I did actually go through this a couple of weeks back on a different angle so some of you
may have seen this if you are regular followers but this is the harness planning design for the
wiring harness that's going into our Toyota FJ40 Landcruiser and on this particular page here
what we've done is listed out everything on the MoTeC M170 ECU that I am using here.
So for example here we've got the injector outputs.
And it's not just the injector outputs, so obviously for a V8 we've got 8 of these running
sequential injection but you can see directly below that I've also listed that I'm going to provide
two 12V feeds from the power distribution module that will go along with these injectors.
To function an injector we need a power supply to one side of the injector and then
the ECU provides an earth to the other so this is everything that we're actually going to
need to make the engine operate and for example here if we look at our throttle
position sensor, this actually goes to the drive by wire throttle body not the accelerator pedal.
We've got 4 wires or 4 conductors that need to go there, we've got a 5 volt we've got a 0 volt,
we've got TPS 1 and TPS 2 or main and tracking as it's called in the MoTeC lingo, these are wired
to AV1 and AV2 so why this is important is it's not just a case of knowing we need a
throttle position sensor.
It's just physically listing out, we're also going to need a 5 volt sensor supply and we're going
to need a sensor 0 volt to go along with that, that's the 3 wires that a normal conventional
throttle position sensor is going to need.
So once we've got that full list, and I'll just scroll down a little bit, you can see it is
fairly extensive, we've got a fair bit going on.
Now we can jump across to our next design planner here which is where we've got a little
bit more detail.
So here I've actually defined the connector that we are going to be using as well as the boot that's
going to go over this so this is an Autosport connector, it is an AS616-26SN.
OK so that, we'll go through how I've got to that conclusion but what we can see here
is we've listed out everything and if we go down to the very bottom, we can see that
we've got 79 terminals, 79 positions on this connector so this is obviously the first place
we need to start.
The last sheet that we looked at, basically once we've got to the end of that, we're going to
know everything that's going to go through the bulkhead connector for example and then
we can decide based on that, how many conductors are going to need to pass through and then once
we know that, that's our first and primary driver in what we're going to need.
In this case, I know that we need 79, I'm actually using every single one of them and there was a
little bit of juggling to get that to work.
So first of all, OK I know I need to have 79 positions.
Now I have worked this around the connector that is available so I already knew that so that's OK,
you're not going to know to start with but once you've got that number we can then
compare this to the TE Connectivity manual which we'll look at in just a second and figure out what's
likely to actually work for our application.
The other thing that's really important here is the conductor size so that's really going to be
the next driver and if we scroll through this again you can see that all of my conductors
here are 22 gauge so I'm using a little bit of a variety of colours but irrespective of the colour,
they are all 22 gauge.
How have I made this decision?
Well that's kind of been made for us because we are using a MoTeC M170 ECU.
The M170 uses 22 gauge or size 22 contacts so we're kind of stuck with that but that makes
sense, that's basically what I'd use to make most wiring harnesses from anyway.
22 gauge, you might be thinking, sounds a little bit light for some of the higher current draw
applications.
There's nothing really too scary in this application that would exceed the 6 or so
amps that we can get through a size 22 or 22 gauge contact.
But if you needed to, and we do have 1 application, I'll just see if I can find it here
and scroll down, we're actually running the starter solenoid wiring through this.
It's not controller by the ECU but it's just a nice way of getting that neatly through the
firewall and a started solenoid can draw 12 to maybe 15 amps.
So obviously if we can only handle 6 amps, the way we deal with this is we'd just double
or in this case triple them up so that's the solution we use to get around that.
OK so we know we need 79 positions there and let's go to our TE Connectivity manual.
So if you just Google Autosport catalogue or TE Connectivity Autosport catalog, you're going
to get to this catalog.
It is pretty extensive, it covers all of their motorsport product, I'll just scroll back up to
the top so you can see what it looks like.
Deutsch Autosport interconnection solutions, if you want to be super specific.
And we're not going to focus on the whole of it, there's a huge amount of information
in here that is really valuable of course if you are trying to spec up these connectors but
we'll go through to page 12 which is for the AS range which is what we are using.
And here we've got the connection, contact arrangement so that's this over here on the
right hand side.
So what we need to do basically is figure out what is going to work for our application and
we can see that there's a variety of different styles here dependent on what you're actually
wanting to fit through, what size of contact or what size of conductor you are using and the
different contact arrangement so for example, this one here in a size 20 shell, this arrangement
will give us 16, gauge 16 conductors so that's obviously for something that's going to be
drawing a little bit more current.
So basically by going through here, you're going to be able to decide what contact arrangement
and size of shell you're going to need for your particular application and again if I get our
connector, so yeah this is an AS620-35SN.
So if we go and look at that, that is this one here so the numbers here in particular,
20-35, so the 20 is the shell size so basically the outside diameter of the shell steps up.
So obviously there's much smaller ones available like this little guy here, they go much bigger
than this as well so obviously the bigger the actual shell size is, the more potential we've got
for a higher contact count inside of that, higher position count inside of that so that's the first
thing, to get 79 positions in this connector, we're going to need to go to the size 20 shell so that's
the first part there.
And then the contact arrangement, because we can see that these two up here as well as these
two here, these are all size 20 shells but with different contact arrangements depending
on again what we're trying to get through.
So it's the 20-35 that we need so that's some of the numbers on this.
But again the first number that's there is AS so that's the series and then we have A6.
So this defines what style of connector that we're dealing with.
So in this case 6 is a free plug so let's see what that actually means.
I'll just get rid of that and we'll scroll down.
Alright so type 6, just mentioned is a 6, is a plug.
So that's important because this is the part that actually does the half twist to engage
so we obviously need a plug and the other side needs to be a receptacle so for the two
to go together, we need 1 to be a type 6 and then we need another one to be a type 1 or in some
cases we might use a type 0.
The type 1 is an in line receptacle so as we can see from the drawing here, we've got no
flange so this is in line, this would be if we didn't want to actually mount it, the other
option here is our type 0 and that gives us a 2 bolt flange which we can see here.
So this is ideal obviously if we are mounting to a firewall, so this is the other half of our
connector for our FJ40, is the type 0.
OK so now we know what the 6 and the 20 and the 35 in this part number, again it was an
AS620-35, all starting to make a bit of sense hopefully, and we can see where those numbers
come from.
The other part is S and N and we need to understand what those mean.
So S stands for socket.
P would be the other option which stands for pin and again just like we need a plug and we need
a receptacle to mate two together, we also need one half to be a male pin and we need the other
side to be a female socket.
If we've got the two halves both with pins or both with sockets, they're not going to go
together and that's an easy mistake to make as well so that's what the P or the S means and
then finally we've got the N on the end of it which just stands for the keywaying or keying and that's
defined by, probably a little bit hard to see on this one but you can see we've got a red band
which is the typical default colouring that we see with these Autosport connectors, that is the
N keying.
And we want to make sure that particularly if we've got connectors that are close together,
we want to make sure that we are using different keying so that it's not possible
to mix them up.
So I scroll down here and this is basically how this all works, just everything I've said.
So AS stands for our range, in this case the normal Autosport.
The next one there is a 0, a 1, a 2 or a 6, 8 or 9 but we're not really using 8 or 9s, they're caps.
So 0, 1, 2 or 6 and then we've got our shell size is our next number then our dash then
our contact arrangement, then we've got our insert type, whether it's a pin or a socket
and then finally our shell keyways.
We've got N as I mentioned is red, that's the standard unless we want
something else, that's what we're going to end up with typically.
Then we've got yellow, green, blue, orange and violet if you really want to get fancy
and colour code your wiring connectors.
So again not that scary once you actually know what you are looking at.
Now there's a lot of other information in here as well that you are going to need.
The next question that normally comes up from our members when they've asked this
question and then they know when to specify an Autosport connector is great, what tooling do
I use in order to crimp these?
So the Daniels Manufacturing Corp, DMC crimp tools, basically the go to standard for
crimping these and these come with positioners though and the positioner is important.
As its name implies, it positions the pin or the socket so that the crimp is going to be applied
in the correct location.
Also gives you information on that about what setting to use on the crimp tool as well.
So if we jump back across to my laptop screen, you can see we've got contacts and
tooling part numbers.
So here we've got our contact size, 16 gauge, 20 gauge and 22 gauge.
Then we've got the actual part number for the socket or pin.
Then if we come across, we've got the insertion and removal tool but these come with the
connectors anyway.
Then we've got the crimp tool that we should be using as well as the positioner for the socket
or the pin so using this manual, it is actually really easy going to first of all, specify a
connector that's going to suit what you are trying to do and then understand what
tooling that you're going to need in order to actually properly crimp it.
Not that scary so hopefully with this information it will allow a few more people
to go and use these connectors.
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