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I ordered some Packard connectors from Saturn earlier in the week. Yesterday I decided to try my recent acquirement of the Daniels AF8 crimper on a new harness. The trailer plug on the back of the M108 is mounted to a bracket welded to the 1/4" plate steel above the stiff leg mounts. The factory wiring just wrapped around the stiff leg and was exposed to elements and bumps from stuff hanging from the crane. My idea was to knock a hole in the plate and run the trailer harness through the hole. a 1 1/8 hole saw made the cut cleanly but the replacement rear harness's trailer plug is permanantly wired to the harness. Here's where the wiring mods came in. It would have been easy to just chop it and reconnect it with butt or spade connectors but I wanted to keep the Packard theme going. When I bought the connectors from Saturn I also bought these tags. http://saturnsurplus.com/electrical/4649.htm Since the trailer plug had the wires tagged I traced them up a foot and stamped and tagged them with these new tags. Once done, I chopped and stripped back all the wires. Using the Daniels AF8 crimper, I crimped on the new Packard connectors on both ends. The crimper is definitly the Cadillac of crimpers for this work. Now the female connectors are too big to pass through the AF8 but they have a spring steel collar to keep tension on the connector. This can be slid off and the crimp completed. The crimping wasn't a quicky job but the end result is a factory appearing and durable waterproof job. Now I can't wait for my new cab to arrive so I can get this thing completley wired and ready for road use. I'll post pics of the completed work by days end.
