[Gmecm] Putting the computer in the engine compartment?

[David Allen]

  It's deceptively hard to seal a harness.  One void between any wires and
it will leak.  It's easy for me to get connectors but I understand that may
not be the case for everyone.  One other idea is to get a hose barb fitting
from the plunbing section of Lowe's, get conduit jam-nuts from the
electrical section, and hose clamps and a short piece of hose.
 Install the hose barb in the ECM box (retained with 2 jam nuts, one
outside/ one inside), as if you were going to use it as a water tank. Push a
piece of hose over the barb just long enough to have 2 inches protrude past
the end of the barb.  Run all wires through this fitting. Once all circuits
are in place, fill in between all wires with sealant such as silicone. Now,
use a hose clamp to compress the hose around the wire bundle.  This will
secure the wires and provide a good seal with the sealant.
  This works but is a lot more difficult and can't be easily modified or
added to after it is assembled.
  Another idea is to use a "Service entrance cable" watertight fitting.
This is an aluminum fitting with a conduit thread (NPT) on one end and a
"nut" on the other.  Inside the fiting is a rubber grommet.  By tightening
this nut, the grommet is compressed down on the cable going throug the
fitting.  These are sized based on AWG wire gauge of non-metallic service
entrance cable.  Lowe's carries sizes big enough to easily accommodate an
ECM harness. Once again, all void spaces between the wires would require
sealant fill before the grommet was compressed.
David

> > mark krawczuk wrote:
> > > hi,  what about using silicone to seal ?
> >
> > Silicone would work fine for the box but you're still going
> > to have water travel down each individual wire.  The ECM
> > connectors aren't weatherproof.  You might get away with
> > filling the connector shells with silicone but then you
> > couldn't unplug the connectors!  Filling the shells without
> > the connection already made would be difficult -- it would be
> > hard to seal the individual pin cavities without affecting
> > the connectivity of the pins and the shells.
>
> the couple gm wiring harnesses I've pulled apart usually have a portion
> of the harness that goes through the firewall via what I call a gooey
> grommet.  there's no connector involved, just a large rectangular
> grommet filled with something a little harder than dried silicone.  you
> could duplicate this with silicone, if the wires were very clean, you
> made sure the glob covered every wire, etc.
>
> --steve
>
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