126 Electrical Connectors

These things are used all over the place on 126's and really are brilliant in their "form follow function" design. There's a hole for a wire to be soldered to and body is a female connector. These connectors are sometimes used singly, for exmaple the temperaturee sensor and oil pressure sensor just have a male pin sticking out of them and one of these connectors just clips on, or wires with these female connectors soldered to them may be clustered in plastic shells forming a multi pin connector. This is expecially clever as you can move the pins around or into different connectors. For example, converting from US spec to Euro headlights (or the other way) is dead simple on a 126, you just open the connector shell, take out the wires with connectors soldered into them, rearrange them in a different order in the other connector shell, close it up and you're done. So you can go from a 6 pin connector on us cars to a 4 pin and a 2 pin Euro connectors in a few seconds with no cutting, no soldering, no muss no fuss.

The only trouble I've ever had with one of these connectors wasn't really the connector it was the wite. My temperature sensor became erratic and careful inspection revealed that the wire was 3/4 broken in the connector. So, I simply took it off, cleaned it up, desoldered the old wire, soldered the wireback in and that was it. All fixed.

These connectors can take up to 10 Ga wire which is pretty handy, but it just fits so you may heva to be careful and/or patient. Here's some pictures of putting a 10 Ga wire into one of these connectors from when I was rewiring my headlights.


Old connector pin desoldered and cleaned up



10 Ga wire in connector



After Soldering



Another view

Richard Sexton