broken wires in door boots

[Draven1474]

The wiring harness that run through the tailgate, driver side door, and passenger side door are mangled, my plan is to slice in good lengths of wire via soldering and heat shrink, but here is my dilemma should I go to the junk yard and cut a section of wiring from the harness or purchase a higher quality wire of the same gauge and splice that in? can the harnesses be completely removed from the vehicle to give plenty of room for fixing or must this be done inside the vehicle with limited space? 2000 jeep cherokee

 

[larryk]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diW-NPz0-60

 

[notamos]

Just buy high quality wire & splice it in. I did this a few months back - had around 5 wires broken in my driver's side door, 4 in my passenger door. I removed the rubber boot (both ends) and pulled the harness back through. This gave me plenty of room to do everything. Not a bad job, time consuming though.

 

[GrimmJeeper]

for some reason this is pretty common in the later model cherokees, especially with the speaker wiring. I had to re-do the passenger side wiring when I put new speakers in, turns out it wasn't a bad speaker it was the wiring falling apart :doh: Maybe the factory harness is just a little too short and gets tugged just enough every time the door is opened? who knows.

 

[Draven1474]

awesome information, so where can I get good quality wire? what gauge wire do I need? while im in there should I do all the wires or just the ones that need it? and what else can I do to prevent ANY future damage to these wiring harnesses while im in there?

 

[lazyxj]

The speaker wires have broken in both front doors in my 2001 XJ. Replaced them with probe wire from an old, non-functioning voltmeter.
Probe wire is designed to be flexed thousands of times without breaking. Look for stranded wire with as many small strands as possible.

 

[HappyDog]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diW-NPz0-60

This video is mostly correct, but it helps to note the following:

1. Roll down the window before you remove the doorskin, because you cannot lift the skin up over the window lip with the window up.

2. After you have lifted the skin off the door, but before you unplug the window control cables, roll the window up. This gives you much more room to reach in behind the speaker and manipulate the boot and cable.

3. After you move the boot out of the way do NOT cut the wrapping around the cable!! If you look closely with a strong light you will see a velcro-like seam along the whole length. Just pull the seam open, and after you have spliced in new wires, just press the seam closed.

4. When you have finished with the splices and pushed the boot back into place, reconnect the controls and roll the window down all the way. Be sure to watch the lower edge of the window as it goes down and make sure you haven't left the cable where the lower edge of the window will catch on it or rub against it.

Reconnect the latch and lock levers, hook the top edge of the doorskin over the window sill and slide the skin into place, making sure all the snap fasteners are lined up with the holes in the door.

Snap the fasteners into place, put in the armrest screws, the screw behind the inside latch lever, and the one in the forward top corner.

Voila!! You're done!

 

[Devilfrog]

I replaced mine with RC car battery wire form a hobby shop. Silcone casing and very fine multistrand. Extrememly flexible and long lasting in high movement situations.

 

[Danger Dave]

X whatever on using a quality replacement wire. I had to rebuild the rear hatch wiring on my 98. Since then I purchased a tool set that can take apart factory connectors so that I can replace all of the low budget factory wiring. I also used rolls of heat shrink from Harbor Freight to make sure any slices are well protected. I was amazed how the factory harness burned out.

 

[Draven1474]

were can I obtain a set of tools like the ones your talking about?

 

[Bpjohns]

I did my 97 XJ Country driver's speaker tonight and wanted to add:

If you're leery of removing the door handle attachment when taking off the interior door panel (I'm too big to climb over to the passenger side if I put the door handle mechanism on wrong ) you can leave the door panel loose, attached to the mirror and windows controls, the door handle and lock. Mine gave me about 6 inches of room. In order to keep it out of the way, I took a cheap non-ratchet tie down, hooked one end under the 'door grab' plastic piece that you use to pull the door shut, threw the other end over the top of the door, along the outside of the door and hooked the other end up to one of the holes that you'll now see in the door's sheet metal. Tighten the strap and the bottom edge of the door panel moves away from the speaker, giving you about 6" of room. If you sit on the ground you'll have plenty of room to work, unless your lift is so high that you can stand up

When removing the speaker, take a look at what colors the wires are: mine were green and black with a red stripe. Instead of following them through the maze of cloth-wrapped wiring, I picked them up after they came through the door boot and traced them into a white connector block. Pop this connector out and examine the wires going into it. I noticed that my green and black/red striped wires were one gauge size larger than the other ones. Grab a multimeter and set it to continuity mode...where it beeps when the circuit is complete. Poke one end into the connector block and the other onto the end of your speaker wire. You may need a jumper wire/alligator clip if your multimeter wires won't reach. Confirm that the wire in question is the right one. In my case, one was a good connection and the other bad, which told me that I was either on the right track since one of the speaker wires worked intermittently, or completely off base. I wiggled the wires in the doorjamb until I got the second wire to beep intermittently. Good to go!

As others have suggested, it's worth running new wire from the speaker to the connector block vs. trying to spice inside the doorjamb boot. I used Belden two-conductor 14ga speaker cable I had leftover from a home theater job. It comes in an outer sheath that came in handy, because I ran it through the boot inside the kick panel area. It's difficult to try and work the wire through the boot effectively, so you can either (carefully) drill or cut a small hole in the remainder of the boot, or lift up a corner of the boot and slide the wire in. The sheet metal will rip off a bit of the wire's outer sheath when you slide it in, but the boot still substantially covers the wiring. I may go back and do this correctly once it gets warmer, but still looks pretty watertight to me.

Now that the replacement wire is in, I started at the easy end and connected it to the speaker using butt connectors to the previous owner's spade connector. I can't imagine trying to solder with the door panel still in the way, but for audiophiles, you'd most likely want to do this.

I connected the other ends of the new wire to the existing green and black-red wires in the harness....quick connection with wire nuts to make sure you're getting signal, then go back and use quality connectors. Now that you've got the wiring working, go back to the speaker side and clean it up by soldering or using new spade connectors onto your new audio wire if you can. Back inside the jeep, I used some velcro tie connectors to hold the wire harness back together..it's a little more bulky with the splices and if it goes bad again, it's better than trying to unstick cheap electrical tape.