Common grounds/power

I'm currently re-wiring all the electronic accessories in my car to make them "neat" Everything will be color coded correctly, connections soldered and many multi-conductor quick disconnects for easy dis assembly.

THe biggest problem i'm running into is that every component requires power and ground. Currently I have a bunch of grounds running around spliced into eachother and all sorts of gross-ness and the power wires are even worse.

Similarly, my remote-lead wire from my radio powers 3 amps, 4 cooling fans and also runs to a GM RAP module and a hard wire over-ride switch.

I'm looking for a way to make a distribution block for low gauge wire (20-16awg) and have a "master power" and "master ground" I'd like to merge 4-6 wires per block.

Any ideas?

I in the same boat as you

For your power lines use a couple of fuse boxes
example http://www.wiringproducts.com/contents/en-us/p4064.html

for the ground lines use some junction boxes

here is a rough pic for the fuse boxes

Well you have a lot of choices.

If I were you I would take a strip of metal (even a crushed flat copper pipe) drilling holes into it and using self tapping screws to make a terminal strip. I would then Place one at every corner of the car. Then you only need to run power wires because your ground runs will be short.

Otherwise...

or


Both will have mounting holes to secure them to whatever you wish

Get the blocks that CorvetteCrazy showed. Then lace all the wires every 1-2 inches to get them where they need to go. This is what we do for the government and it looks good. We ran 1000 wires through an entire console, wire laced it up, and it looks great when you're done.

PwrRngr wrote:

.... This is what we do for the government ....

We all know the saying "Good enough for government work"........

corvettecrazy wrote:

PwrRngr wrote: .... This is what we do for the government .... We all know the saying "Good enough for government work"........

We all know how many times the fire control for the Trident missiles has miss fired or faulted......................ZERO.

I used Allen Bradley Din rail terminals they have the Joiner in the middle then you run 1 power into it then can use both terminals as outputs

I've also used aluminum /copper blocks and drilled holes the right size then drilled and tapped holes into the top and used set screws into the holes to clamp the wires

Another way is to use ring terminals , and then run a bolt thu the entire stack and use it for the grounds
For the positives do the same and usea nut to tighten them ansd then insulate them

I'm thinking the barrier strip with the jumpers may be the best option for my application and it would provide for easy future expansion.

For the Barrier strips I found that stripping like 10 inches of wire, then loosening all the screws on one side, and wrapping it in and out all the way down the strip. Screw the screws down and trim the excess stripped wire.

corvettecrazy wrote:

For the Barrier strips I found that stripping like 10 inches of wire, then loosening all the screws on one side, and wrapping it in and out all the way down the strip. Screw the screws down and trim the excess stripped wire.

hopefully you insulate that afterwords

JSewell wrote:

corvettecrazy wrote: For the Barrier strips I found that stripping like 10 inches of wire, then loosening all the screws on one side, and wrapping it in and out all the way down the strip. Screw the screws down and trim the excess stripped wire. hopefully you insulate that afterwords

Why? The barrier strip isn't insulated, why would I insulate a wire connected to the barrier strip?

its not exactly very stable compared to using the spades

but hell, you'll do what you want

http://www.westmarine.com/webapp/wcs/stores/ser...mp;subdeptNum=9&classNum=295

kinda neat... im not sure if this is what your looking for but it defenitly can clean up some installs

60$ for that

wtf

im assuming its waterproof?

Radioflyer wrote:

I'm thinking the barrier strip with the jumpers may be the best option for my application and it would provide for easy future expansion.

good choice. i use the same as well.. they make life a million time easier

Barrier strips installed today. I decided to use them only for power since there are 12 possible grounding points in the cabin i can use. I decided to run a single 8 awg power wire into the cabin for all my accessories. This was split into (4) 12awg wires.

1) Reverse light relay
2) 400w power inverter
3) Barrier strip 1: All sound system components (head unit, processors, nav system etc)
4) Barrier strip 2: All accessory components (decorative lighting and other gizmos)

The biggest problem i'm runnning into now is trying to clean up the "data cables" These are complicated cables that aren't supposed to be cut. Trying to find a way to secure them, but I'm sure i'll figure out something.