Quote Originally Posted by HardRocker View Post
Great work Shoeless. The great stock of tools you have make everything a magnitude easier. A tip on long runs of + - signal wiring like Canbus etc is to pull an arms length longer of wire than you think you’ll need, clamp the ends in your vice, and the other ends in your electric drill. Walk back to pick up the slack and then twist away (for “twisted pair” noise rejection) and then trim the ends. Also get an armful of plastic cable wrap at Harbor Freight! Also those cheap “helping hands” stands with the alligator clips make holding all your soldering work easier still.
Thank you for the kind words HardRocker and you make some excellent points, enough so its worth going into some more detail. High quality proper tools definitely go with out saying. When you are creating a mil-spec harness there really is no room to cheap out, although I have found some good budget tools that I will be trying along the way. One specific example of this is the tool I will use to crimp the pins on my Molex MX123 connectors (those identical to the LS computers as Shane pointed out to me in an earlier post). The recommended tool is a Molex 63811-4200 that retails for around $360, while the Molex 63811-1000 will do the same crimp but sells for about $50. If I was going to build more than one of these, I could likely justify the $360 pair, but I'm only building my own right now so I'll try the $50 pair on some test wire first.

CAN Bus cable is another great topic to discuss. You are absolutely right on pulling more wire off the spool before you twist and then cut to length. Another approach is twist a really long run and wrap it around a spool for later so you can cut off as much as you need, when you need it. Now on to the question of how many twists per lay length is ideal. Well, it varies by the diameter of wire you are going to use, although it is a broad range that easily overlaps for different wire diameter size. You should target a lay length of between 8-16 times the diameter of the wire, and lay length is the distance down the length of the wire as it makes one revolution. When you go to actually twist it with a drill, to help it from fraying apart and relieve a little tension, you can actually over twist it and then back the drill the other way to untwist it a little until you get the proper lay length. This will give you a very nice and clean CAN bus network that will work as intended.

Oh yea, and you mine as well grab a bag of about 1,000 small zip ties to us for your entire harness building project as they will be used as a consumable item throughout the whole project