heinzboehmer's 2002 Topaz 6MT Coupe

[tlow98]

Was your old electrical tape surprisingly brittle? Mine had very little tack left and peeled off easily after being cut with a straight blade.

nice work here! Tedious job.

[heinzboehmer]

Alright here's some more details about the grommet replacement.

To start, I just followed the harness and disconnected all the plugs that were on it. This involved removing the turn signal, moving the coolant expansion tank out of the way, etc. The hardest plug to get to was the one on the AC drier. I ended up moving the wheel well liner out of the way and disconnecting it through the wheel well. Here's the sensor:



The firewall grommet snaps into place from the inside out, so I pulled the entire thing into the passenger compartment:



Old grommet was cut off cause I didn't feel like feeding a million wires through it. Here's a comparison between MK20 (right) and MK60 (left) grommets:



And from the back:



It's pretty obvious that they're pretty different. The MK20 grommet is a two piece assembly with two mounting spots, while the MK60 grommet is a one piece unit with only one mounting spot. Fortunately, they're mostly interchangeable. I did find that I had to slot the mounting hole slightly, but that was the only modification necessary:



With the old grommet off, I got started on feeding all of the harness wires through the new grommet. To do this, I depinned every connector and then repinned after the wires were through.

The one caveat were the ground wires. These attach to a ground point behind the turn signal that is not like the rest of the ground points on the car. This one is completely sealed, so there's no depinning the wires and feeding them through. What I did instead was to keep all ground wires that I depinned from connectors "outside" of the grommet. I did try stuffing the entire ground post thing through the grommet opening, but it was waay too big.

Halfway through:



Aand finally all of them:



It's hard to see, but there's one ground wire that I ended up cutting. I wanted to avoid cutting any wires, but I tried following this one and could not find where it went to without taking a bunch of the interior apart, so I just gave up and cut it.

Grommet in place:




Getting those three tabs clipped in required a decent amount of messing around. I ended up using a socket extension to push on the grommet from the inside and got them seated.

Here's that one ground soldered back:



And heatshrink added:



I also took the opportunity to clean the super hard to reach places, which was quite nice.

And finally, everything wrapped back up in electrical tape. So far the super 33 has been holding up great:




I kinda want to rewrap the other side after seeing how this side came out. Maybe when I decide I have nothing better to do to the car I'll do it, but I'll be taking a break from wiring for now.

[heinzboehmer]

Success!



I ended up having to pull the harness into the interior and depin every connector to get them through the grommet. I did give up and cut one wire though, a ground that I wasn't able to trace in the body harness. Not bad for the amount of cables running through that grommet though.

Now just need to rewrap and reassemble all of this:



I'll post up some more pics later, just to document the hard parts (and to remind myself not to do this again).

[heinzboehmer]

You are an absolute madman. I definitely would have just plugged that hole with plastic!

I strongly considered it, but I already have the grommet so might as well. What's five extra hours on a job that would have otherwise taken 15 min, right?

The thing that fully convinced me to do it this way was that most of the tape close to the plugs is peeling off, so it's going to be nice to rewrap all that.

[Bry5on]

You are an absolute madman. I definitely would have just plugged that hole with plastic!