113: A “Mil-Spec” Wiring Harness is Total Overkill for Most People.

Speaker 1: 0:00

It's kind of one of those mind-blowing moments like this guy put enough thought into this harness to make sure that the lettering on his Raycam all lines up. Well, yeah, imagine what it looks like when you take the Raycam off of it, because we put hundreds of hours into these harnesses to make sure all the layups, all the breakouts, all of our transitions are as smooth.

Speaker 2: 0:28

Welcome to the HPA Tune In Podcast. I'm Andre, your host, and in this episode we're joined by Eric from Hardwired Performance. Eric specialises in building high quality, state of the art professional motorsport wiring harnesses let's call them mil-spec and we'll talk about that term in our interview and he specialises in doing this mainly for the off-road market, specifically the likes of trophy trucks and ultra four. He's found his niche in the market and that's what he's focusing on. I think in general, a lot of enthusiasts tend to be a little bit scared of building their own wiring harnesses, and I've always put this down to the fact that when it comes to wiring, we can't specifically see the voltage, we can't specifically see the current. Well, unless things go really wrong and the smoke starts to escape, and this makes it a little harder for people to understand what's actually going on With Eric. We go deep into his background and find out that he's actually got an incredibly wide range of skills in the aftermarket automotive performance industry. Specifically, he understands how to spin spanners and perform general mechanical tasks. He's also great with fabrication. He's built engines and then, of course, he's really found his own passion, which is the wiring, and he's essentially completely self taught here. So we go through his journey of learning to work at the level and standards he's currently working at. I also talk about the fact that a professional motorsport wiring harness, while it looks amazing and obviously is incredibly reliable, it's also possibly not the right option for absolutely every application, so you do need to decide on your aims and your budget. Obviously. That's important. We'll also talk to Eric about some of the parts that we see in the professional motorsport world, such as autosport connectors how these work, why they're used and what's required in terms of tooling and skills in order to work with them, before we get into our interview with Eric.

Speaker 2: 2:29

For those who are new to the Tuned In podcast, high Performance Academy is an online training school, and we specialise in teaching you how to make your car go faster. We do this with a wide range of online video based training courses that you can take from anywhere in the world, provided you've got an internet connection. We cover topics on engine tuning, engine building relevant, of course, to today's topic, also motorsport wiring. We also cover 3D modelling and CAD fabrication, and the list goes on. You can find all of our courses at hpacademycom forward slash courses, and you can also use the coupon code podcast75, that'll get you $75 off the purchase of your very first HPA course. Worth also noting. All of our courses come with a 60 day no questions asked money back guarantee. So if you purchase and decide it's not quite what you thought it would be, that's OK, let us know. You'll get a full refund of the purchase price.

Speaker 2: 3:24

Lastly, if you like free stuff, then I've got a great deal for you. We are always partnering with some of the biggest names in the aftermarket performance industry and giving away great prizes. You can find our latest giveaway at hpacademycom forward slash giveaway. This could be an aftermarket ECU, it could be a set of pistons or conrods or just about anything in between, and if you win, we'll ship it free of charge to your door, no matter where in the world you live. We'll put that coupon code in the show notes so you can find it nice and easy. Let's get into our interview now. Alright, thanks for joining us, eric, and as usual, let's start by finding out a little bit about your background and specifically how you got interested in cars For me it was actually something I grew up around.

Speaker 1: 4:08

So my dad has always been like a hot rod guy, kind of old school street racer. So I mean, I grew up around muscle cars and drag cars and stuff like that. But it was funny, though, growing up, you know, my dad always kind of because I got a younger brother as well and my brother or my dad always pushed my brother and I to kind of follow a different line of life and work, if you will, very much, I always imagine, as most people, wanted us to be doctors or lawyers or something where we, you know, be really well off, you know, not get into the car world, because my dad, you know, obviously he owned shops and would be working in his garage all night after work and he didn't want us doing that same thing, you know, just working non-stop, working all the weekends, working holidays yeah, I think we've probably all been there as sort of enthusiasts and moving into shop ownership and it can definitely be an all-consuming passion slash sort of vocation.

Speaker 2: 5:06

So yeah, I mean I get that Personally being a doctor or a lawyer not a lot of appeal for me and obviously not so much for you either.

Speaker 1: 5:14

Yeah, exactly. And what was funny for me and it's still a very like a funny you know thing that I bring up to my dad all the time is I told him. I said if he would have made the car thing look less fun, I probably would have been a doctor or something. But the thing was the whole time he's telling me and my brother not to do this stuff. We're going out to the street races with them. You know, I'm seeing all these awesome cars. I'm seeing all these guys having a good time. We're going to car shows. I'm loving it. I'm seeing these, you know, just super outrageous cars that, like my brain is just like oh man, this is the coolest thing I've ever seen. I want to figure out how it works. Why'd they do this, why'd they do that? And, uh, yeah, I always tell them. I said, you know, if you would have made this boring for me, like I would have never wanted to get into cars, but, like, problem was, dad, you made it pretty cool.

Speaker 2: 5:54

So here, I am well. I mean, let's be honest, it is pretty cool, which is why I'm doing what I'm doing and why you're doing what you're doing. At the end of the day, being a parent myself, I don't think one time in the history of having children has telling them not to do something ever actually worked, so probably predestined to get deep into the car scene. So how did this sort of develop? It sounds like drag racing and hot rods were probably the start of it. You kind of look like you're more deeply involved in the off-road sort of ultra four trophy truck market these days. So yeah, tell us how the passion sort of developed.

Speaker 1: 6:35

So for me, like I said, you know, growing up with my dad around this stuff, it was kind of a no brainer. But as soon as it was time to graduate high school, you know, my parents like were like well, you got to get your stuff together, what are you going to do? Are you going to go to school? What are you going to go to school for? I had no idea what I was going to do. So obviously it was like well, I got to get a job first. So I ended up working at a little local hot rod shop three days a week just to make a little bit, actually pursuing a couple different avenues. I was actually kind of like following up, trying to get my music major, because I've also been a musician most of my life. And then at the same time I started dabbling in like the culinary arts. Okay, but again, cars were way more fun than learning six different ways to cut a potato. And then while working at the hot rod shop the other thing that happened that I tell a lot of people when they ask me how I got into this money I realized that you build up a really good skill set. There's always going to be work and that work comes at a price tag. So I really quickly kind of made that weird decision in my head where I was like you know, culinary arts cool man, I could learn to cook arts cool man, I could learn to cook chicken and slice a potato. Or there's the music major.

Speaker 1: 7:50

I was like I don't even know why I'm doing that, besides the fact that I've played guitar since I was like 10 and this is easy For me. It was like I want the money, so I just want to go to work full time and making money doing something I've already enjoyed. I was like it's kind of a no-brainer. So essentially, the one thing I don't like telling people was yeah, I dropped out of school and just focused full-time working at the hot rod shop. It just became that thing where my passion was then going to then take care of all my necessities in life. So it was kind of, again, it was just a no-brainer. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 8:22

I think that sort of decision that you faced is just so common. I mean, at the age we have to make decisions on what direction we're going to go with schooling or tertiary education, I don't really see that too many people have got their life plan figured out at that age and can kind of see another 50 years into the future of what they want to be doing. So it's very, very difficult to make these decisions. I think that it sounds like the way you weighed these up and made that decision for yourself is pretty sensible. And I've said it before, I'll say it again if you can follow your passion and obviously that passion also has to involve something where you can make money but if you can turn that passion into a career, then for the most part you're never going to work a day in your life.

Speaker 2: 9:07

Now, that's the cliched saying. The reality is, I mean, as we all know, not every day is going to be sunshine and unicorns. There's still hard work and days where just the shit literally hits the fan and we're not going to get around that. But I think, yeah, for the most part we set ourselves up in a pretty good place and I've been now in this industry for longer than I care to admit, and I still absolutely love it and I'm passionate about it. Alright, so working at this hot rod shop, you've obviously got, at this stage, no formal skills or qualifications, so you're just literally learning on the job and I'm assuming at this stage this is involving sort of spinning spanners, figuring out how these cars go together Exactly.

Speaker 1: 9:45

Yeah, when I'm assuming at this stage, this is involving sort of spinning spanners, figuring out how these cars go together exactly.

Speaker 1: 9:48

Yeah, when I first started at the hot rod shop, I learned probably one of my most important lessons, and that was there is no job that's too small, there's no job that's too big, and by that I mean I started at that shop literally sweeping the floors, cleaning up the messes of the other techs that were above me.

Speaker 1: 10:03

There'd be guys that would be welding the chassis together and at the end of the day, it was my job to clean up all the welders, to wipe down the fabrication tables and put away everything. Sweep the floor and I know a lot of people don't like to hear it, but that's where you have to really start off, I think, to gain that respect for the craft itself. And I guess more or less that's where you learn that sometimes you are. You're going to be in the absolute shit if you will Not every day, like you said, it's going to be this rad day where now, not every day is going to be working on a concentric harness at a nice clean workbench doing something. Sometimes it's going to be troubleshooting something where you're laying underneath the dash of a car that could be covered in dirt, covered in oil, covered in grease.

Speaker 2: 10:46

You know, and you have to just take that with strides and realize that you know, you've been preparing for this from the get-go, when that was sweeping floors and wiping down machinery yeah I think that's a good point you you make because unfortunately too often and we've we've had work experience people through my old business as well as through High Performance Academy and I think sometimes and not always, there's this expectation that you're going to walk in and sort of start at the top end, but that's almost never the case. A you're not going to come into this position with the skills required. And B yeah, you've got to put in the hard yards and prove your work ethic and work your way up through the ranks. I think being prepared and understanding that that is the general trajectory of most people's careers in this industry is pretty important to understand.

Speaker 1: 11:35

Yeah, exactly, and you know, that's kind of the thing where, you know, I've had employees, I've had people work for me and I've had interns. I've been pretty lucky that most of the guys that have come through and worked for me worked with me. They've been great people in general. They understand the way a shop works and the way a performance company works. You're not going to come in and right away the first thing I'm going to do is hand you a schematic and tell you, hey, build this harness. I'm going to tell you, hey, here's a sheet of paper. They're going to look at it and go, what is this? That's a cut list sheet of paper. And they're going to look at it and go, what is this? That's a cut list, every single wire on there.

Speaker 1: 12:07

You're going to go and you're going to pull me 30 wires that are going to be this length. You're going to cut them. You're going to put them in a bag. You're going to cut 100 wires that are this length, cut them, put them in a bag. And that's going to be your job for the first two weeks, with a good attitude, because, if so, like this is going to lead you down that path of again carrying a good attitude, even when you are in those situations where you just want to close the door and go home, and it's a good test to see where someone's going to lie. You know when things get heavy, how do they work under pressure. And again back to that same thing. You're not going to always be sitting at a nice, clean workbench building a beautiful harness. Sometimes you're going to be elbow deep in the garbage.

Speaker 2: 12:51

Definitely I think, at the risk of really proving my age here, I think what you're talking about there with that, you know, cut list, here you go, you're going to spend two weeks cutting wires to a specific length and you know, on face that doesn't really seem to be a very critical part of wiring, but it's almost that whole again showing my age. The Karate Kid, mr Miyagi, the wax on wax off, all of these things that at the time seem completely irrelevant, like how on earth is this really going to help me? And over time you start to see like all of these pieces of the puzzle come together and build up that bigger skill set. So yeah, just a little anecdote, I thought I'd chuck in there to show that I'm pretty old. Sorry about that. All right, let's get sort of back into the trajectory of your development. So how did you get into the more sort of motorsport wiring based skill set? How did that develop? Because I'm guessing these hot rods probably didn't have professional motorsport wiring harnesses in them so not necessarily so, believe it or not.

Speaker 1: 13:52

You know, I spent a lot of time at these hot rod shops actually working, like I said, honing in a bunch of different skill sets. But then I kind of found myself in the niche more on the fabrication side. So I got into the point where I was doing small fabrication, I mean little things like making brake pedal mounts and then it moved up into doing a little bit of the chassis work. Then it was okay, I'm going to have you build an intake system and then next thing, you know, I'm doing full chassis. So I actually kind of came into it more from the fabricator standpoint. And then at the shop that I was at, it was basically me the owner and there was like two other guys that worked there. It was a really small shop but we put out really really high end builds, so we would build maybe three to four cars a year. But again that whole thing came up where I approached the boss. I said, hey, I would like to start earning more money. What do I have to do? And he said, well, you got to keep basically picking up skillsets. And I said, okay, well, what's the next one? And you know then it was. You got to learn to plumb a car. Okay, you got to learn to assemble this, you got to learn to assemble an engine. And then one of the ones on that list was like you got to learn to wire the car. So I started kind of shadowing him and I kind of learned it. And then it got to that point where, maybe like a year into it, I'd be going home every night too, kind of studying and messing around with stuff. You know, kind of like really digging in, like well, why is he doing this? And and a lot of these things was right when, like the LS swap first came around. Because again, to kind of show my age, you know, I mean I've been in this industry for going on like 25, 26 years now and I mean this was right. When, like the LS1 kind of jumped out and we're like whoa, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, stop doing these. Like injected small blocks. You know, like no more of this Arizona Speed, marine or you know, edelbrock LT1 style injections. Like this new LS thing is kind of cool. So we're finding these Camaros and Corvettes in junkyards and we're pulling the drivetrains out of them, we're swapping them into these cars. So I would start really digging into it like, hey, how can we streamline this? How can we make these work in these cars? What do we got to do? How can we bypass this system? So I kind of became that, for lack of better terms.

Speaker 1: 16:02

I was that guy that was just geeking out in my room late at night just reading through, literally. I was getting the all-data wiring pinouts for the LS1 Camaro and trying to figure out okay, how do I get this thing to run as a standalone without having to stuff a bunch of other little modules in this thing to make it run? And then, once we kind of cracked that, started doing that. I started building standalone harnesses at this shop and did that for a few years. And then, out of nowhere, this other shop. They approached me at one of the car shows and said, hey, we've been seeing a lot of the stuff you've been doing. We're kind of trying to push that same envelope. What would you think about coming to work for us? So naturally I picked both of those bosses against each other. It was like who wants to pay me more?

Speaker 2: 16:46

Obviously, money talks at the end of the day.

Speaker 1: 16:50

It didn't go the way I wanted, you know, because basically I had one guy that was mad at me and said I couldn't come back to work and the other guy I didn't want to pay me what I was making there and I was like, well, I guess I'm screwed, I'm taking less money and going to the new shop, but at the new shop that sounds like it kind of backfired on you quite significantly it definitely backfired on me and it was one of those lessons that again, I learned in life.

Speaker 1: 17:08

We're like, hey man, you know, sometimes you just you're not as cool as you think you are.

Speaker 1: 17:13

So um, you're not as smart as you think and they're not as dumb as you'd hoped exactly, but probably one of the coolest things about it, though, was the shop that I ended up working for. He was really, really into pushing the envelope, and we went from just doing your basic ls swaps to then building these full tube chassis, pro touring monsters, and again, these things were fairly simplistic. You know they weren't anything compared to what you would see on a racetrack. You know they were basically just key in the ignition, start the thing up it.

Speaker 1: 17:43

It would have a stereo, it would have AC, working lights, but, yeah, we wanted to make 1,000 horsepower, so we were building all these twin turbo LSs and stuff, but we were still running them on stock, like GM, like the E67 ECUs and stuff. We were limited, and then the whole aftermarket ECU world really came onto our radar, and I started telling the boss like, hey, man, if we really want to push this, you know we got to start looking at other options Like these GM computers are going to hold us back. I don't care what this company says about unlock that ECU, like there's other features that we're going to need.

Speaker 2: 18:17

That in and of itself a little bit outside the scope of our chat, I think is just worth mentioning, of our chat, I think is just worth mentioning. I mean, it's always a tricky one and, yes, you could definitely make well over 1000 wheel horsepower with an LS with twin turbos and a factory ECU. There is no doubt that can be done. Should it be done At that point? Are we better to go with a standalone? That's a difficult question to answer as a blanket rule and there's a whole lot of grey in that. A whole lot of it just depends on the application. I tend to be with you, though. I think you get a lot more control with a lot easier interface for most tuners when you start going standalone, particularly for motorsport applications, motorsport functionality, data logging, some of the more advanced features, particularly for motorsport applications, motorsport functionality, data logging, some of the more advanced features, such as motorsport style traction control, closed loop launch control sorry, closed loop gearshift control for dog boxes. The list goes on.

Speaker 2: 19:15

So yeah, I am with you, but I know there'll be a few people listening, sort of getting their backs up at that comment. Yes, it can be done. Should it be done? I don't know, that's up to the individual. Before we go on as well, I just want to dial back a step. So it sounds like that stint at that first hot rod shop really set you up with a wide range of automotive skills. You mentioned obviously the fabrication, general, mechanical, even engine building, and then onto wiring. So once you'd sampled the full sort of plethora of skills in the automotive scene, what was it about the wiring? That sort of really stood out to you. As this is, this is where I'm most passionate for me.

Speaker 1: 19:57

I've had to answer that question a handful of times and what it really came down to was there was nobody else really out here that specialized in wiring and really pushed it. So I mean there was. You know, we do. We have a handful of like hot rod and pro touring shops. We have a handful of race shops out here. We've got a couple of like the biggest off-road shops out here and none of them ever really hung their hat on the mechanical and the wiring side of things. It was always we've got the best fabrication or we built the most beautiful hot rod, the most beautiful pro touring car or the most nasty off-road truck, but never did you ever hear anyone say anything about those.

Speaker 1: 20:43

Guys have the cleanest wiring, they have the best functioning cars. Oh, I've taken one apart and it was super easy to work on. Most of the time all you ever heard were horror stories Like a customer gets his car blah, blah, blah, whatever he takes it to a tuner, they have a bunch of issues, they pull a dash out and it's just this complete cluster of just nonsense. So for me it became that thing of a. I saw a niche, I saw a gap in the industry out here where there was nobody that specialized just in wiring. Everybody had a wiring guy at their shop, but their wiring guy was basically just a mechanic that understood that you need 12 volts and ground to make most circuits work, and that's about the extent of their knowledge yeah I, and there's getting the job done and then there's getting it done to a standard that actually makes sense for the application.

Speaker 2: 21:30

I think the other part of this puzzle as well, and I sort of saw this during my career. At the start of it, social media really wasn't a thing. Now, obviously, everyone's on Instagram and only takes following an account like your own, which we'll talk about a bit later or Joel at RaceSpec, or Levels Motorsport, or basically any of the guys out there who are doing professional motorsport harnesses. So all of us as enthusiasts can see these amazing professional harnesses and often the details behind them. So then we can sort of start looking up to these people and these products and then trying to build those skills ourselves, whereas in the earlier days that wasn't so prevalent. I mean, there's obviously professional motorsport wiring harnesses, and the techniques of constructing them really aren't new. They have been around for years, decades. But unless you were actually going to high-level race meetings, you probably weren't exposed to them. So I think that's another thing that sort of shifted the direction of the market, both in the enthusiast market as well as professionals like yourself. Would you agree with that?

Speaker 1: 22:34

Yeah, absolutely, because that was. That was always a big thing. Especially again, I felt like so many people used to put such emphasis on hiding everything. It didn't matter what was hidden behind those fancy panels or under that super badass carbon fiber dash, because you didn't see it.

Speaker 1: 22:51

Now, with social media, obviously, everybody, no matter what it is you do for work, whether you are a fabricator, you're a mechanic, you're an engine builder, like myself, if you're a wiring specialist you like to put your skillet and your craft at the forefront. You like to share it with people. And now it has. It's become a thing that that everybody looks into, because now it's, it's taken the forefront, whereas before everything was just how's it look from 10 feet Didn't matter. If it was a race car, a pro touring car, you know, a muscle car, it didn't matter. What it looked like from 10 feet was all that mattered. Now, even if you break it down into things like the SEMA build craze, everybody likes to follow every step of that build and the finished product is, albeit this great grand thing. I feel like there's more hype behind each individual step leading up to the final product these days, because of the fact that social media has highlighted each person's craft, whether it's the guy that's TIG, welding the chassis or doing like I mean.

Speaker 1: 23:53

Now you have these guys that are specializing just in building headers and exhaust and they have their own companies and their own pages and people are like you know, they'll build a full chassis, they'll build an engine and then we'll send it to this guy halfway across the country just to have him build a header and an exhaust system.

Speaker 1: 24:07

I mean I can say, for example, I've worked on cars I actually just finished one not too long ago that I mean we ordered the turbo manifold from a company that's in Australia and it's like okay, so we had this exhaust manifold built. We waited five weeks to have this thing show up, because the guy that built it is, hands down, like he's the baddest ass dude at doing these particular manifolds for this particular car. Yep, yeah, fair If you want the best. Yeah, you go back 10, 15 years ago. You know, to the average Joe that wasn't a thing you know it was. You buy whoever's available in your hometown, but nobody knew any better, because social media didn't put the spotlight on these guys who have completely honed their craft or just, you know, really zeroed in on a specific aspect of a build.

Speaker 2: 24:55

I think social media, in that respect, is a blessing and a curse, and this is one of the problems I see is now all of these enthusiasts coming through, getting excited about the automotive industry, maybe starting out with their first project car, and they're following all of these accounts and straight away they think well, when I do my wiring, the only way I can possibly go is a full suite of top end electronics with a fully booted in sheet harnessed with Autosport connectors.

Speaker 2: 25:25

And again, I have to have the best fabrication, the best exhaust manifold, the biggest turbo. And the reality is you also have to choose products and options that are going to fit with your budget. And you look at a SEMA build. Often the budgets are outrageous and or a lot of the products are being sponsored, so it's not the real world. So I think it's really important to understand there are levels to this and we need to choose a level that suits our application and our budget. Otherwise we're going to end up with a project car that sits in the shed for the next 10 years because we can't afford to finish it. I mean, it's much more fun to drive a car on the road than look at it sitting on a lift.

Speaker 1: 26:05

Yeah, oh no, and trust me, I can vouch for that, as I've got a driveway full of cars that I myself have not touched in a while.

Speaker 1: 26:12

So kind of leaning back to that too, with the SEMA thing having stuff fit in your budget kind of, I guess. Going back to again how I ended up where I am right now, at the one shop we had this customer that came in and basically said I got an open checkbook, I want the best of the best of everything. And this was nearly a decade ago, probably a little less. And all of a sudden the research started and that's when we reached out to a lot of people and I was like, all right, we're going to go full MoTeC, we're going to do this, we're going to do that. And that was really one of the first times that I had done a full motorsports harness in like a pro touring hot rod. And when all was said done, the price tag on everything was so out of control. This car ended up I have. I remember I want to say the final price tag on the build on this car was like $1.1 million.

Speaker 2: 27:05

That's when you find out how open that open checkbook really is.

Speaker 1: 27:17

Exactly. But it was also one of the first times I remember doing the wiring that I had done, for 90% of the projects leading up to that point were more of the straight run. Every wire has got to stay perfectly parallel. Every zip tie has to be perfectly spaced. For the most part I was using like tech flex. You know the woven loom on everything. There was a few like off-road projects or, like you know, some buddies drag cars that will do like an engine harness. You know we'll do like an LS swap and we'll run it off of like a Haltech ECU or something and I would build a motorsports grade engine harness. But then the rest of the chassis was just same thing straight run zip ties.

Speaker 1: 27:49

But this particular million dollar car, it was no, we're going to go everything fully sheet, fully booted, headlight to taillight, this thing you know. I think it had three Motec PDM 30s in it. We ran the Motec M150, digital. I had a full gamut of all the parts and my boss at the time would always kind of ask me to project what I thought the cost was going to be on the electrical portion of it. Always a tricky one, yeah Well, sometimes you end up just really really getting yourself into trouble. But this one I remember I was like you know what, if we're going to try and estimate this out for the customer, I got to really really think about it. I started crunching all the numbers for my suppliers and I remember telling them like man, we're going to be somewhere near like the $50,000 to $60,000 just in electronics. And it was kind of one of those like oh man, I don't know if the customer is going to go for that.

Speaker 2: 28:50

And it's like well, I'm pretty sure I heard open checkbooks, so to me it sounds like he doesn't have much of a choice right now. Yes, it is. It is amazing how quickly the price creeps up on that. I think that the harder part well, at least for me to estimate and I mean I didn't, I never produced a heap of these harnesses. Maybe it does get easier as time goes on and you've just got more runs on the board, but I mean it is so labor intensive, so incredibly labor intensive, from both the planning stage through to the actual construction stage. I mean relatively easy to estimate cost on the hard parts, the electronics and the consumable materials, autosport connectors, et cetera. But yeah, the labor just can be totally just out the gate. So I'm interested to say how did you go about estimating that totally?

Speaker 1: 29:24

just out the gate. So I'm interested to say how did you go about estimating that? So that was the thing was like with that car. I had an idea of what I thought it was going to take time-wise, based on what was going to be involved in the car electronic wise, but I knew the labor was going to be far, far, far more than what it was to do a straight run style setup, so I literally just took basically my my labor from previous projects and doubled it. I literally looked at it and said, okay, normally it takes me about 80 hours to to headlight to taillight wire like a 65 Mustang, and I said, all right, this is probably gonna take closer to 200 hours to build these harnesses.

Speaker 1: 30:05

The biggest difference too, though and why I ended up where I did and how I do things now is, the greatest thing about the motorsports harnesses is, if you do it right, you're not doing it in the car. You're doing everything on a bench. Everything is done as sub harnesses, everything is done with bulkheads and pass-throughs, so you build everything on a bench, based off of a schematic and measurements that you've compiled, and then you just put it into the car, whereas a lot of these previous builds. You're mounting your fuse boxes, you're mounting your relays and stuff like that and you're laying under the dash wiring up the dash wiring the gauges. So there were certain aspects that even though it was going be more labor intensive, time wise it wasn't gonna be labor intensive as far as how I guess you didn't really have to be super limber to sit in a chair at a bench. You know that was a lot easier than trying to stuff.

Speaker 2: 30:52

You know, six foot 250 pound me under the dash of a mustang it's always fun sort of tangle yourself around a roll cage and across a race seat to try and get up under a dash to do some particular wiring job. So you're absolutely right. Working on the workbench, um, it's probably probably a good on your body as well yeah, so that was again.

Speaker 1: 31:11

that was one of those things that when we did this car and the car I'm referring to um, I'm, there's probably quite a few people out there have heard of it, but it's the vicious mustang. Okay, this thing was everything was built on benches, put in the car, I mean even down to the suspension. Everything was all done in these sub assemblies. So we built all like the rear cradle, everything all done, with the third member center section bolted up in the car, all the wiring, same thing, everything was done in sub harnesses, then installed.

Speaker 1: 31:40

But what really kind of kicked off a lot of things in my mind was when people started asking what a build like that cost, because the car quickly went on to be known as the million dollar Mustang and a lot of people would start, you know, basically badmouthing it. Like, how do you, how do you, put a million dollars into a 65 Mustang? It's like, well, because there's nearly 200 hours just in the wiring on this car there's, I want to say we had something like 10 000 man hours in the fabrication, the bodywork and all the other mechanical aspects. It's like when you start breaking that down into 140 an hour in labor, then add material costs and all these crazy obscure parts that we put on it, you hit the million dollar mark pretty quick.

Speaker 2: 32:22

While you've been talking, I just, of course, googled vicious Mustang and we'll put a link to this in the show notes, because it's an incredible build and looking at this, yeah, I can quite easily see how the price got where it got to. I think, consistently, people who haven't been involved in a build at this level dramatically underestimate the cost. Just, it's so easy to add it up and particularly, as you mentioned, that the labour for professional fabricators that can work at this level, it's just not going to be cheap and it's going to take hundreds and hundreds of hours. So, yeah, the price can blow out of the water very, very quickly. All right, let's just sort of get up to current day a little bit. So at this stage, obviously, you're still working for for this other company. At what point did you sort of decide the time was right to make the move and go out on your own?

Speaker 1: 33:17

so it actually was at about the completion of the vicious mustang. Because while doing that car I I had actually had other shops in and around our area that were kind of seeing that car pop up wherever, especially on social media. You know, the thing was a firestorm and a lot of people started reaching out saying like hey, like you did the wiring on that. Like yeah, yeah, I did, and you're local. I didn't realize you're local to us, you're right here in Ventura County. Like yeah, I am Like well, hey, we do a lot of high-end builds like that too. And then, you know, I started making contacts with other shops, other builders.

Speaker 1: 33:51

That's when I really really noticed, like what I talked about earlier was there was this empty, this giant void in this industry. Out in our area. There was nobody that specialized on high-end motorsports wiring and I saw an opportunity and I did. I started to entertain some of these other shops. We have other high-end race shops. We got like Dean's Performance that does a lot of drag cars. They reached out to me a couple of times on some cars.

Speaker 1: 34:23

Kibitech Off-Road was one of the first guys that actually got me into the off-road scene. Ryan reached out to me and I had done a handful of projects with him and it kind of like just snowballed out of control, I guess. Where I'm doing all these things, I'm getting off of work at the hot rod shop at like 5 o'clock and I'm going to these other shops and doing work, and then it just became this like you know what, I could probably make a full-time job out of just the wiring. And I made that mistake that a lot of people make, which is, hey, I could work for myself, I can make my own hours, I can make my own schedule. This is going to be great. Sounds so good, right? And I always tell people that's the one thing. Yeah, you get to make your own hours. They're usually 24-7.

Speaker 2: 35:03

Yeah, the only problem with working for yourself is you can make your own hours, but if you're not working, you're not making any money.

Speaker 1: 35:10

Absolutely. So, yeah, I just took the opportunity and I jumped in, I got myself a little shop space. I brought in like four cars, kept the ball rolling, it did it snowballed. Because it's a really, really weird one for me because, like I said, my background is more from the pro touring scene. I worked on a lot of guys that did a lot of autocross time, attack, drag racing, stuff like that.

Speaker 1: 35:32

And then all of a sudden all of these off-road guys were like, hey, you know, uh, mil-spec wiring became like a catchphrase and it became this thing where if you have an off-road truck and you take it serious, you have to have mil-spec wiring. So everyone found out that that's what I did. So it started like basically steamrolling, you know, and it wasn't even doing like full wiring harnesses. There were guys that were coming to me that just wanted a simple eight-channel PDM just to control their lights, but it had to be mil-spec. And I'm like, okay, but you know, nothing else on this truck is going to meet the same specs as just your light harness. Yeah, you can go put this thing up to the door handles in water, everything's going to fail, but your lights will still work, sure, but I won't lie. At the same time I took advantage of it because everything that I could get in the door was more experience, more practice, and I've always pushed that more than anything.

Speaker 1: 36:25

Any opportunity you get to use your skillset and to further hone it I did. I rarely would turn work away because someone would come in with something super simple. I've got this pre-runner truck that I'm building and I want to put an LS in it and I want a full mil-spec engine harness. Same thing. All right, yeah, I can do that. I've been doing that for years. Let's do it. Did it make sense? Sometimes no, because they still had the stock body wiring in the truck. But now they had this super sick mil spec you know wiring harness in their truck, going to their stock ecu. But you know they just a lot of people wanted.

Speaker 2: 36:58

You know what the big race guys were running yeah, I think that kind of comes back to what I was saying before. You see other people, and particularly on social media these days. You see all of these builds with a professional motorsport or mil-spec wiring harness. So people want what they see and that is essentially the highest end of the range that we can go for. So does it make sense? Probably not if the rest of your wiring isn't also at that level. But yeah, I mean, have at it, You're only giving them what they want. I don't see an issue with that. Before we dive into some of the more specific topics I've got lined up here around wiring, and professional motorsport wiring in particular, let's just get kind of a 30,000 foot view of what hardwired performance looks like today. So, for a start, you've already mentioned Ventura, Southern California. That's your location.

Speaker 1: 37:50

Now currently I've downsized a little bit and more or less that kind of happened when the whole pandemic thing hit. I used to have a pretty decent sized shop in Ventura County but when the pandemic hit what it really kind of brought to the forefront for me was that majority of the work that I do I don't necessarily even need the cars in a storage facility. I guess when you've got a 2,500 square foot shop with six trophy trucks in it and you're doing the wiring on them 90% of the time, you measure the truck and then you build it all on a bench and then install it on the truck and then power it up for the first time and test it and do everything.

Speaker 2: 38:31

But it's like, essentially, why do I have all this overhead just to store people's projects? I think that's an easy trap to fall into in in any form of motorsport. The number of times I sort of looked around and realized that we were storing six dead cars for customers, you know, while the engine was out for machining and being built or whatever. And I I mean, yeah, like you say, you've got the overheads, you're paying for that floor space, whether or not it really makes sense. So if you can do most of it remotely and then maybe do a site visit to measure up and then again for the final installation and commissioning, that definitely makes a lot more sense to me.

Speaker 1: 39:04

Exactly so. Now what has evolved is I do primarily function out of a local off-road shop here it's GFO, prep and Fab, because I do do all of their wiring now and they actually keep me pretty busy. They've got, you know, at any point in time, you know they've got three, four, five trophy trucks going together at a time. But I've also been working on streamlining, you know, a workshop at home because, again, most of the time, you know, I've got projects right now where I go to guys whether it's his personal garage or he's got a little shop for his little race program I'll go there and I'll measure the car, go back, you know, to my garage or the GFO and build it on a bench and then go back and install it. So I've been kind of going through this new evolution of setting up a workshop at home to do these things and then also, like I said, functioning out of GFO, primarily doing their work. But also, okay, do I want to now build out a like a sprinter van that has a mini workshop and stuff so I can go to other shops and do things.

Speaker 1: 40:06

But the other thing that has changed too was pre-pandemic. I was taking on all kinds of work as well. I had one full-time guy working for me and I had an apprentice that was coming in and helping and we were doing everything from your more basic club level stuff and then still doing hot rod restoration wiring to now where basically, if it's not motorsports grade wiring, I basically just kind of I'll suggest someone else to do that work. You know, because I still get people that will contact me. Hey, you know, I've got a you know 69 camaro that I want to have a painless wiring harness installed in it, and you know I'll very politely tell them that I don't do that anymore and you can contact this shop. They've got a pretty good guy working there.

Speaker 2: 40:51

What's been the sort of advantage, main advantage in just niching down to only the professional motorsport wiring projects? Is it a case of just honing and refining your skills because you're doing the same thing over and over again and getting better at it? Or is it a case of there's more money to be made in that particular product versus a club level harness, or yeah?

Speaker 1: 41:14

I wish it was more money made. You know, every once in a while every once in a while, you run into these projects where you do like we had kind of mentioned earlier you try and estimate the build and then as you get into it, you track all your hours. Sometimes you realize that you highly miss or underestimated the number of hours that you're going to have into that project. So you end up kind of taking one of the shorts. But the biggest thing for me, more than anything, to be completely honest, it's the materials.

Speaker 1: 41:43

When you're doing a very broad range of wiring, or levels of wiring if you will, you got to keep certain materials on hand. So if you have the guy that wants to bring you his weekend, take it out, go cruise around town, classic car he's not going to want to pay the money for all the Tesla wiring and the Raycam, all the Deutsch connectors and all that. He's going to want more of the weather packs. He's going to want more of the TXL wire and the woven insulation. Now, when you get into the fact that you're going to have a full range of colors of wire and engages a wire, now you're sitting on $10,000, $15,000, 15, 20 000 dollars in inventory in just txl wire, where you're already sitting on 50 000 dollars in inventory of just tefsel. So it's like for me it's it's streamlining and just only stocking and maintaining one type of material and that is just the motorsports material, or motorsports grade, if you will yeah that, yeah, that makes sense.

Speaker 2: 42:47

On that note, with the Tefzel wire, I mean it's not that cheap, as you say, you've got to have a range of gauges on hand. I personally transitioned to use almost exclusively white Tefzel just for that particular reason, and that I don't now have to keep 10 different colors of each gauge of wire. I still tend to use red for a 12 volt, black for a ground, green for a sensor, zero volt and orange for a regulated five volt. So I'm not exclusively white, but I just find that simplifies things.

Speaker 1: 43:23

Yeah, you have almost the same system that I use. Yeah, you have almost the same system that I use. I still do run. You know I stock most all 10 colors in both, like 22, 20, 18 gauge. But same thing. Most of the times I'll use white wire and then you just use your markers on it. I use orange for my five volt, I use brown for my sensor grounds, black for 12 volt grounds or switch grounds, red for 12 volt.

Speaker 1: 43:55

But that's also been a struggle too, is I went through that phase where here I use Joey, who's actually been a good friend of mine for a long time over at ProWire USA. I've almost exclusively used all of his stuff for as long as I've been doing this professionally and I went through that phase where I was having him make me custom wire all the time, like, oh, you know, I want white with every color stripe. So now I've got 10 rolls of white striped wire and then I've got 10 rolls of red striped wire and then that goes out throughout all the gauges and I'm looking at going you know, I've got nearly 200 rolls of wire like even maintaining this is out of control. And then, you know, I kind of evolved into that thing of saying, like you just said, just white wire for all of my sensors and I just use different color bands to mark and label everything.

Speaker 2: 44:40

Let's just talk a little bit about that, because this is the obvious question we get when we say we use white wiring for a harness or how do you know what wires what? And obviously that's a valid point. But you've sort of alluded to it a couple of times with colored markers, so can you sort of explain a little bit more detail what exactly those are?

Speaker 1: 44:57

yeah, so back in the day before a lot of these guys were selling these kits. You know you would just buy these six inch sections of colored shrink wrap and we would cut them down to little like eighth inch little rings and you would just put it, you know, at either end of that wire. You know, like, whether you used a white wire and you put a little green piece of shrink wrap and shrunk it right next to your pin on either end, or you know a green and red. Now a lot of these companies I know Joel over at RaceSpec sells a kit with the identifiers. I know Joey at ProWireUSA sells kits with the identifiers.

Speaker 1: 45:31

It's one of those things that for me, I know a lot of guys they're going to have that chip on their shoulder Like, well, if you're a professional, why aren't you running the striped wire? Well, again, it leads back to like, how many rolls of wire do I really want to have? Because it also takes up real estate versus. Yeah, if you just keep a 1,000-foot roll of wire on a rack, I could build an entire engine harness out of that. And all I'm doing is picking out little identifiers to mark which wire is which.

Speaker 2: 45:56

Yeah, and I think it all just comes down to your documentation. These ident kits each of the colors has an associated number so you can use two or three of these ident little coloured heat shrink bands and then add that into your documentation. So you know, I'll do it sometimes for a pin location, so it might be pin 23 or something. So obviously you put a two and a three on there very easy when it comes to pinning out that particular connector, yep, cool, I know exactly where that goes, and again it feeds back into the documentation. I think the other aspect that's worth just clarifying here is like there's no sort of right and wrong way necessarily to do this. A lot of it just comes down to developing your own preferences and, case in point, I talked about how the fact I'll still use a red wire, a green wire, a black wire and an orange wire inside of my otherwise white harness. You're doing it slightly different with coloured idents. That's absolutely fine, but it's just a case of you know how you're doing it and you stick to that.

Speaker 2: 46:55

Let's move into some of the sort of elements of what makes up one of these harnesses. I'm going to guess that most of the people listening probably have a pretty good idea. But just for clarity's sake, let's get a really quick overview of what makes for a motorsport grade wiring harness. You've used the term mil-spec in there as well, and we hear this thrown around. It's a term I personally struggle with a little bit because it is thrown around willy nilly and the reality is a lot of these harnesses aren't actually at a military specification. So I like professional motorsport wiring harness or race spec, and the reality is a lot of these harnesses aren't actually at a military specification. So you know, I like professional motorsport wiring harness or race spec. But you know, choose your poison, it doesn't really matter. So what is it for you that makes a professional motorsport wiring harness what it is?

Speaker 1: 47:40

For me because, again, I'm just like you and I'm just like other people I know Joel from race spec was also big on it too, which is I don't necessarily like the term mil-spec, because nine times out of 10, these harnesses don't live up to those military grade specifications, although we use a lot of materials that will meet their specs. It's the way that we use them. But for me, all of my harnesses, all of my motorsports grade, as I like to call them, I use Tefzel wire, every harness. It's the only wire I stock Raycan DR25.

Speaker 1: 48:15

I know some people also get into that argument of do you use the white letter or the yellow letter? As weird as it is, I prefer the yellow simply for the way it looks once it's shrunk. I prefer the yellow simply for the way it looks once it's shrunk, because I have noticed that the white, for whatever reason, it finishes with a dull, almost a porous look to it. The yellow has a very sleek, almost like hey, someone has put some kind of protectant on it, you know. So I use the yellow. That it is, it's the industry standard. People like to see the yellow lettering, people like to see the shrink labels on it which I get so many questions to people ask all the time how do you DR25.? Here in New Zealand we struggle to really get anything other than the white writing.

Speaker 2: 49:18

But the point I'm trying to make here is, yes, we're producing a harness that's got to do a job at a very high standard, and the most important element with these style of harnesses are very, very high levels of reliability under a very harsh environment in terms of vibration, dust and liquid ingress, etc. So that's the key point. That's the most important one. But the elephant in the room here is like these are also at least in my opinion and, I'm assuming, yours. They are a thing of beauty. We do take a lot of pride in the way these look, and for a lot of people who absolutely do not need a professional motorsport wiring harness for their streetcar, they're choosing it for that same reason, for the look. So that is an important aspect of this, maybe not the most important one, but it is something that goes hand in hand with it. So, yeah, I totally get that.

Speaker 1: 50:01

Oh yeah, so I mean even to go a step further than that. Some people will actually dive deep enough into my social media and I've had people make comments about oh, I really appreciate that you go as far as to make sure the lettering on all of the legs of your loom all go the same direction. And a lot of the times I pay attention to that. When a harness is laid on an engine, from no matter where you are, I want to make sure you can read the Raychem on it. Because if you're looking at an engine harness, you've got a branch going to the coils and a branch going to the injectors and one section of it reads left to right and then the other one reads right to left.

Speaker 1: 50:37

That absolutely kills me, Because that, to me, I'm like it's just one of those weird details that when you see it, it's kind of one of those mind blowing moments. Like this guy put enough thought into this harness to make sure that the lettering on his Ray cam all lines up, and that just further goes into like, well, yeah, imagine what it looks like when you take the Ray cam off of it. Like, because we do, we put hundreds of hours into these harnesses to make sure you know all the layups, all the breakouts, all of our transitions are as smooth as possible, as clean as possible, and it's more than just making it look good for the gram and I'll come out and I'll say it. You know, I know a lot of people. You know you've you've made the comment people use social media as kind of a measuring device or as a metric I couldn't.

Speaker 2: 51:23

I couldn't agree more. Aligning the direction of the lettering on the Raychem for me is absolutely essential. The other aspect of I go a little deeper, and I'm sure you do as well, with the likes of the labels that I'm cutting. They're always going to be the same length and I'm always positioning the same distance away from the connector that they relate to, and it's just about getting that uniform look and that's just taking pride in your work. And the harsh part about you know, when we're diving into building a concentric twisted harness, is that all of the work that goes into that concentric twisting then gets hidden by the DR25. So to a degree we're putting a lot of effort into something no one's ever going to see. However, the DR25 is kind of a little bit you. You know there's not a lot of room for hiding things. When it shrinks down you'll see the sort of shape of that concentric twist underneath, so you can kind of see if it's been done nicely or there's some ugliness in there as well.

Speaker 1: 52:21

Yeah, exactly, and that's again. That's another thing that goes into it.

Speaker 2: 52:24

Right, let's talk a little bit about that term concentric twisting. So this is probably one of the mainstreams other than Autosport connectors behind these harnesses. So can you give us an overview of what concentric twisting is and why it's done so?

Speaker 1: 52:39

yeah, again, another thing that's part of a motorsports grade harness the way that we build them up is everything is concentric, twisted. It's not just for looks I know a lot of people are going to assume it's for looks but it has a massive, massive advantage and that is, yes, it helps us keep our bundle size down, but it also adds flexibility to a harness. A lot of times I think people don't even think of that aspect of you know some of these main branches, whether it be a chassis harness or an engine harness. You know they can get upwards of three quarters to a full inch in actual cross section. And now, when you need to route that around an engine or around a chassis, around a roll cage or a tube, if you were to do that in a fully you know paralleled harness, trying to do that, you're going to put all kinds of strain on different conductors. Now with the concentric harness, each layer obviously it reverses the direction of the twist, which helps the previous layer stay tight and organized. But what it also does is, if you were to take that and I actually have a sample section that I keep in my shop where I've built up a one inch cross section um little mini loom, if you will, and it's about a foot long and I could take that and I could wrap that twice around my wrist and you see very, very, very little deviation at the either end of the wires. And when you show that to someone for the very first time, to look on their face is like, okay, it all makes sense.

Speaker 1: 54:09

Now it's again. It's to keep the size compact, keep it clean, keep it organized. It helps in install because when the outer layup is a nice, smooth, consistent diameter, when you have to move it along a chassis, you don't have to worry about snagging up against something potentially, you know creating, you know whether it be an abrasion or something. But when you have to route it through a chassis, you're not building these things on a bench around like a template with bends in it. You know, unless it's like a hard 90 that has to go around something, then we'll use a molded boot to kind of cheat and create that hard 90. Otherwise everything is done in straight runs. But it's very, very flexible, so you can then lay it onto your chassis or lay it onto your engine, tie it down as needed without creating any additional strain on any of the leads inside of that harness and then, once you pair it with your back shells and your boots and your, your epoxies, you're further taking off any strain at any end of that harness. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 55:10

And I think people who haven't actually manipulated a concentrically twisted harness or for that matter, even a parallel run harness, will probably struggle to sort of understand that. But it is really impressive when you have, like you say, your little test section of harness there, how tightly you can actually bend that. And again the point you've made, there is, even with these bends, a relatively tight radius. You're not actually placing any more stress or strain on any one of the individual conductors inside of there than any other, whereas if you do that with a parallel run, the ones on the outside bend of the radius are going to be placed under quite a significant amount of stress and strain. And this is all about the reliability of that harness over time. Sure, probably you're not going to end up with a conductor fail out of the box. That's probably unlikely. But in a motorsport environment where we're exposed to high levels of vibration, it can happen over time. Doesn't mean it will, but it can happen and we want to avoid that particular risk.

Speaker 2: 56:13

Now, on top of this there are some queries that we complaints I guess we always get when we talk about concentric twisting. Obviously one of the drivers with motorsport is we try and keep the weight down. So the first argument we get is well, concentric twisting, because we've got an angle to this twist, we are using more wire, we have to have a specific number of conductors per layer. We can't just put any number in there or they don't fit properly. So typically the outer layer. More often than not we're going to end up with not the correct number of conductors to make up how many need to go into that layer. So we have to make up those missing conductors using filler wire which is essentially just along for the ride. So adding to the weight, not really adding to any advantage with the harness. So you've got any sort of comments there on the weight of a straight run versus a concentrically twisted harness, and is this just a case of prioritising strain relief over outright weight minimisation?

Speaker 1: 57:05

I mean obviously, yeah, when you get into this whole thing of having to run the filler wires, you start adding weight.

Speaker 1: 57:10

Granted, depending on the particular scenario, the car, whatever it is you're running, it could be something that's completely negligible, it could be just a few ounces, grams, whatever.

Speaker 1: 57:21

It may not equal pounds, but again, the most important thing to us and to me is to make sure that my harness, my loom, is as mechanically sound as it can be. So, adding the filler wire to make sure that nothing has any chance of moving within the loom and you had made the comment about adding your filler wires to the outside layer A little secret. A lot of times I'll actually sit down and I will do the math for each layer, and sometimes we'll kind of mess around with it. And, if need be, if I have a three conductor core to make my layup work out right, I'll make two of those wires a filler to cut down on the number of filler that I need on the outside layer. Or what it does is it reduces the need for an additional layer. So the location of the filler wire sometimes can be even in the core, just to make the layup right, as simple as moving two conductors, from my core to the outside, to use less filler, if you will.

Speaker 1: 58:22

Yeah yeah, that's smart now again, it's all about keeping everything mechanically sound. Sometimes those filler wire. Although it might be known as a filler, I'll actually run it as an auxiliary or a spare. Let's say I'm going to like an autosport connector and I've got you know. Let's say I need four filler wires to get my layout perfect, but I've got six open pins on that autosport. I'll pin four of those to it and then the other two. I'll just run the pins and just put plugs in the back side, but I'll anchor those filler wires to that and I'll run those somewhere into the loom where you know what. Hey, you never know, I might want to expand and add a module here. So I'll actually use those as a 5 volt, a 12, 12 volt, a chassis ground and a sensor ground and just put them somewhere in the loom.

Speaker 2: 59:10

Yeah, that's worth digging into in a bit more detail, because it really comes down to how much more thoroughly you need to do your planning for the style of harness, probably, first and foremost. It's not a case of just getting out a few rolls of wires and setting to it to start building your harness. It really does require some pretty thorough planning. We develop all of ours just using a simple Google Sheet spreadsheet, but I'll actually go through and plan each of the individual layers because we know from the diameter of the wire. Basically we can work out how many conductors we're going to end up needing past the core for each of the next layers. So we know before we even start making it where we're going to get to with the requirements for filler wire. The other aspect you touched on there is just adding in some expansion capability in the future, because one of the real big downsides with this style of harness is they really aren't overly serviceable.

Speaker 2: 1:00:02

If you get down the road a little bit and decide, hey, you know what, I want to add another sensor. Maybe I want to add another sensor, maybe I want a coolant pressure sensor. Well, I mean, if that hasn't been allowed for when the harness is designed and constructed, you're going to have a hard time adding that in. They're not very easy to modify in that respect. So yeah, as you say, if you've got additional pins available on your connector, your ECU, it makes a lot of sense to add that into the mix there and then, and then you're doing a better job of using up the not requiring filler wire, so to speak, as you go as well.

Speaker 2: 1:00:36

On that note as well when we are planning the lay up, I'm just interested in how granular you get with this. Again, if we don't plan, maybe we've got a bulky connector, we've got a run of, let's say, 200 millimetres to the first branch point for our engine harness, and it'd be really easy to sort of just do your concentric twist up to that first branch point and find out. Well, now I actually need to extract one or two of the conductors from the very centre layer for this branch that's going to go out in one direction. Do you go through and sort of plan a bit more? So the location of the conductors in the concentric layout makes sense for how it's going to branch out at each point.

Speaker 1: 1:01:12

There's two rules that I try and follow when I build my harnesses. The first one is I normally try and lay the larger conductors in the center.

Speaker 2: 1:01:22

Yep makes sense.

Speaker 1: 1:01:23

So, even if that means running like a shielded pair or a shielded like a three wire conductor, those always end up in my centers and then we'll lay up things, you know, as they break down. You know if, if that means running a pair of 12 gauges and then a single twisted shielded pair and then building on you know a couple 18s and 20 gauges on that and then the next layer is all my 22s. But at the same time you do kind of want to play with. Okay now, if we're talking whether this is like the main branch on, say, a dash section, or like a PDM sub harness or an engine harness, where you're going to run 30 of the wires one way, 25 of them, another 16 of them are going to go this way, you kind of want to think about that as well, as far as you know what's going to make that branch out better. Especially, one of the ones I get a lot of comments on is whenever I'll post up like a T transition or like a, like a molded T boot. A lot of people tell me you know, I tried doing one of those and I hate those. It's like well, yeah, cause they, they definitely can suck when it comes time to get those broken out, to get those broken out. So sometimes you do kind of want to work around your breakouts and work around your transitions, because that can very quickly become one of the more stressful points of a harness. And you know what.

Speaker 1: 1:02:37

Sometimes too, there's a lot of the times I'll follow a rule at if something's going to come out of a breakout and it's going to travel, whether it's 10 inches, 12 inches, 20 inches a lot of times I'll play with that as well, as does it need to break out here, or can I have another breakout, say maybe 10 inches further down the loom, and will that help me in the sense of this previous transition, like at my main transition, because sometimes it's easier to keep that core running a little bit longer. If you're going like, for example, I just finished up a trophy truck and the rear chassis on these trophy trucks, believe or not, has a lot going on, because you have almost all your cooling is done in the rear of these trucks all your radiators, your transmission coolers, oil coolers, everything's in the back of these trucks. Obviously your fuel pumps are back there. So you got a lot of large gauge stuff, but you're gonna have a lot of breakouts, so sometimes it just makes sense to break everything out at one point and run.

Speaker 2: 1:03:32

You know, a 30 inch long or a 40 inch long lead to each fan, versus trying to break them out every 12 inches yeah, yeah, there's also a lot more work and trying to break all of those out, uh, you know, at each step of the way it's a lot more work, there's a lot more moulded boots. So it is a bit of a case of weighing it up on a case-by-case basis. Again, coming back to there's not necessarily a black and white. This is the way it must be done. There's pros and cons.

Speaker 2: 1:04:00

Coming back to what you said as well yeah, I think it's safe to say that those two or three core shielded cables, those always make a really good base for the core of a consensually twisted harness.

Speaker 2: 1:04:11

And also we want to kind of get all of those awkward conductors into the centre. I'll typically also put my twisted pier for can in there as well, the reason being that if we try and sort of get to a point where we're laying up the outer layer, which is the one that's going to be most visible under the DR25, and again I'll refer back to the fact that the aesthetics of this do actually they count, it's important. But if your outer layer is sort of maybe a bunch of 22 gauge conductors, but then you've got a two core shielded cable, maybe a CAN high and low twisted pair. I mean that's just not going to work nicely under the DR25. So we want to kind of get all of that into the core where possible and best laid plans. Also, sometimes you are going to be in a position where you just need to break out something from that very centre and it just is what it is.

Speaker 1: 1:05:03

Yeah, exactly. And then there are times where I've been backed up against the wall and I have no choice but to run that twisted pair for a can network on the outer layer. And again, there's little tricks in there. You know where, if you're running a pair of 24 gauge twisted for your can, I'll basically plan it where I'm running a 20 gauge on either side of it. So that way, once I put my ray cam on it and it's shrunk, it almost kind of bridges the gap, and you, it's not as noticeable. That, yep, hides it a little bit exactly.

Speaker 1: 1:05:34

So. I mean there are. There's a bunch of little things in the tricks that you learn as you do this. A lot of it for me, because I don't. I don't have any kind of formal education or training in this per se, I've just worked under a lot of people. I've had the opportunity of having a lot of really smart people that have made themselves available to me when I've asked how do I do this, how do I do that? Then there's also just the trial and error, because a lot of it is.

Speaker 1: 1:06:00

There is no reinventing the wheel as far as what makes this work, but there is experimentation on making things aesthetically pleasing. That's where you learn to do some of the weird tricks that you know. I'm going to keep a couple of them in my pocket, but we have some weird things that we do every once in a while when gauges don't really match up. You know, when you've got a pair of 12 gauges and or, let's say, you've got four 12 gauge leads that you need to put in the core and you know if you've been doing this long enough, you know that you can't really make a four wire core out of all match conductors. So there's little tricks that you use to offset that and make it work out for you. But a lot of it is just trial and error to get that aesthetic look that you know. We'll just go ahead and say maybe 80 percent of people. That's the reason for choosing this type of or level of wiring.

Speaker 2: 1:06:48

Yeah, I think there is an element of form follows function or function follows form as well. You know, essentially what I'm saying is that if it looks good it's often going to work better. I can't say that's always going to be the case, but you know, at this level I think that is something that goes hand in hand. I've just mentioned the fact that I use a simple Google sheet for my planning and documentation of the harness and I don't get any more granular than doing a simple hand-drawn sort of breakout and with lengths et cetera, all my branch points and my connectors et cetera, and I just draw that on a piece of paper and then I'll scan that and take a photo of it and put it into my google sheet. So I've got that as a reference. So this is kind of enthusiast level stuff because the cost is absolutely free. There is also some professional harness design software that's available. I'm just interested are you using anything like that yourself?

Speaker 1: 1:07:43

so I actually do a lot of what you're talking about myself. A lot of times my design starts off just a pin to pin spreadsheet, using Google Docs or spreadsheets Nine times out of 10, it all starts off just on just pen and paper, just sketching out where things need to go, how many conductors they're going to be getting out there, measuring it, drawing everything with a straight edge, making all my notes, and then I'll transition it into a software. Recently I got put onto a new software that's called Rapid Harness. It's a pretty cool software. I'm still learning it. I've only been using it for, at this point, maybe seven or eight months, but it does a lot of the work for you where you basically you draw your harness out, you do your pin to pin ends and it actually will populate your cut list for you. It does a lot of the tedious stuff that we used to do. You know, by I started for a little while, you know, using like a drafting table and drawing everything up and then and then moving it into like Visio. But RapidHarness has taken a lot of those steps and kind of just doing the work for you. I guess is the best way to put it. It's essentially like doing your Google Doc and then you just tell it like, hey, this is where that connector is, this is where that connector is, here's where the breakout is, and it'll basically create your cut sheet for you. Granted, you know, it's not taking into consideration the concentric twist, but that's where you just kind of add your 5% to 8% length and do what you got to do.

Speaker 1: 1:09:16

But no, I still start every harness with a notebook, you know, a pen. I get my straight edge, my ruler, my measuring tape. I get my straight edge, my ruler, my measuring tape. And I've actually built my own custom little measuring tape. That put up a post a while ago on my Instagram. That kind of like caught on fire because everyone asked like, where'd you get that? And I'm like, oh no, I spent like three hours making this thing. One day I got a 10 foot long raw section of a spark plug wire and then I made, I set my, my label printer up to one inch sections and I literally just printed every other measurement on it. So I have this 10 foot long piece of spark plug wire that I'll like route it throughout a chassis or an engine, cause it kind of acts the way a bundle would.

Speaker 1: 1:10:02

But yeah, I'll start by just hand drawing everything and then I transition it over to my program. But everything always starts off. You know just super basic, because you know I can't tell you how many times you draw something up and then you go back and you change it. You know whether it's because you've decided to move a certain sensor or move. You know you're moving the PDM, now we're going to put it over here. Now you put it here. So you end up drawing these things out by hand three or four times. For me it always starts basic and I mean I'll just come out and say it. I don't think it really matters what level you do this at. You have to be proficient at the basics, no matter what. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:10:39

Couldn't agree more, I think. At the end of the day, the documentation is just so critical when you're building a harness at this level not just as well for the construction, but the classic one that most people don't even give any thought to is what happens in six or 12 months time when we want to make use of that additional breakout that we added for future proofing and want to wire up to that and you're never going to remember what was in there. You need something to refer back to or alternatively, hey, maybe something's gone wrong and we just need to start fault finding and diagnosing Again. Having that documentation is critical, so most enthusiasts people listening to this. Probably Google Docs or just a spreadsheet in general is going to be the go-to, and that is absolutely fine. It's probably not until you're working at a professional level, like yourself, where you could probably justify the ongoing cost of using software like hardware or rapid harness, as you mentioned as well.

Speaker 2: 1:11:36

I just wanted to take a moment out of our interview with Eric and talk about a course that we've put together. That's going to be perfect. If you've enjoyed this interview and maybe you want to learn to make professional wiring harnesses, just like Eric did. Well, fortunately, you don't have to learn the hard way, being self taught like Eric, because we have our practical wiring professional motorsport harness construction course. Normally valued at $299 US, we've got a coupon code that'll get you a good chunk off that I'll cover in a moment. So this course covers everything that you need to know about the techniques that are required for this style of harness construction. Specifically, we'll talk about power supply design, sensor and grounding designs, actuators. We'll talk about our network design, material selection, harness routing. Most importantly, we'll talk about what concentric twisting is and how to actually build a concentrically twisted harness. We'll also learn about the documentation and planning that's required to work with a harness. At this level, you'll also learn about some of the skills such as splicing, branching, sheathing, booting our transitions, potting electronic components and working with autosport style connectors, electronic components and working with autosport style connectors.

Speaker 2: 1:12:53

Once you've learned these fundamentals, we then have our HPA 10 step process that you can apply to your own wiring job and, by breaking the entire job down into 10 individual steps, each of those steps is relatively easy and quick to complete and in no time you've got to the end. You've got a properly designed, documented and constructed harness. You've also gone through and tested it to ensure that each pin goes to the correct place. You're going to have that confidence that when it comes to installing and powering up your harness for the first time, everything is just going to work like it should. Once you've gone through that, we've also got a library of worked examples where you can watch that 10 step process being applied from start to finish on a real wiring job. Now, as I mentioned, this particular course is normally $299 USD. You can use the coupon code HWP hardwired performance, that is, hwp50,. That'll get you $50 off, bringing it down to just $249 USD. Remembering, you're still protected by our 60 day no questions asked money back guarantee, so zero risk of purchasing, and you can also use our payment plans to break that down and make it just a little bit more affordable.

Speaker 2: 1:13:59

Alright, let's get back to our interview now. Let's move on to some other topics here. One of the products that we're going to see always in these professional harnesses is the Autosport circular style connectors. These are a pretty expensive product which is pretty daunting to start with. Can you give us some of the advantages of the Autosport style connectors over the more regular connectors we'd see in street level harnesses? You mentioned Weatherpack earlier. Dirt is another connector that I use regularly, even to the advantages over an OE style connector.

Speaker 1: 1:14:38

Yeah, I mean first and foremost, I think when you really really set these things side by side with You're more daily driver, even when you get into the little higher end OEM style stuff. It's the layout and it's the size comparison. You can get some of these autosport connectors where you have 100 plus pins in one connector but the footprint on this thing is similar to what you would find in maybe a 20 pin OE connector. So obviously there's the massive advantage of being able to pass that many conductors, that many signals through such a small footprint.

Speaker 2: 1:15:16

And there's a wide advantage that comes with that as well.

Speaker 1: 1:15:19

Of course you know you know when, especially when you have I mean shoot like on this trophy truck that I just did you know you've got 14 of those things on one truck. You know it's like you start weighing that that does actually add up to a pound just in those connectors. But the other massive thing is again we've talked about it multiple times now it's that mechanical, just sound structure you have the ability to now create your In most of these things. You got your service loops in there, you've got your Raychem and then you're going to have a molded boot that you then epoxy to both your Raychem and to that Autosport connector. That even though I'm the one building the harness and installing the harness and maybe around the vehicle for the following few days while we test it and do all the programming, I might not be the guy that's pulling that engine out or pulling that section of a sub harness off to work on the vehicle. Now, when everything is said and done, it should be to a point where somebody can just simply do the quarter turn, disconnect that, remove the engine with the harness still on it and be able to simply put it back in quarter turn, lock it down.

Speaker 1: 1:16:28

Now, if you've got four or five of these OE connectors, you know it just gets a little daunting. It also, you know, can be confusing if you have very similar ones. And that's when you run into these things where it's like guys are trying to plug the wrong connector in and next thing you know, your phone's going off at midnight because this guy's trying to get his car ready for a race and can't figure out why this connector doesn't match anything. And it's well, because that doesn't belong there. First of all. But the serviceability is always a massive thing, you know, because everything needs in my eyes at least, needs to be able to be easily identified and serviced by just about anybody.

Speaker 2: 1:17:04

Yeah, definitely Take the room for error out of it.

Speaker 1: 1:17:07

Yeah, exactly, you know. Again, the other thing too is cleanliness. It just looks super clean, it looks nice, it's presentable. When done right, it can bring a certain level of that top tier fit and finish to a project too. You know whether it is a full blown race car or it is your, you know, a show car. I mean, we're starting to see a lot of this stuff showing up in the show car world now too, because of the fact that you can get so much of this wiring compacted into one you know connector, and you can hide it behind an engine or you can hide it up in a fender and you're not dealing with big ugly grommets and a bunch of stuff bunched into this one thing. So there's a lot of advantages, I guess, both mechanically and aesthetically, but obviously for me it just comes back to it's got to be serviceable, it's got to be strong, it's got to be resilient and it's got to last.

Speaker 2: 1:18:02

I'll add a couple more into this convo because I think for me the reliability of the Autosport Connect connector in a harsh motorsport environment is probably the key. It's not until you've dealt with a factory connector that starts to get intermittent and faulty that you start realising that some of these OE style connectors just really aren't up to a motorsport environment. Case in point the Bosch Motorsport drive by wire throttle bodies, which the name should be a clue that they're up to motorsport use, and I personally have had trouble with that particular connector on our endurance car. The engine isn't solid mounted but it becomes more of an issue when it is Even. That being said, once you've sort of got stiffer urethane bushes and things like that, there is a lot more harshness being introduced than you would normally get. So we got about a year or maybe 18 months of use out of that with no problems. Then we started seeing the tracking errors come in for the two throttle position sensor circuits. They weren't matching and as a temporary measure to get by because we were at a race meeting when that happened we sort of had no option put a cable tie around the connector and the connector body pulled that tight and all the problems went away.

Speaker 2: 1:19:21

I mean, obviously that's a bandaid, not a solution, but that's the sort of thing we can see with OE style connectors, these autosport connectors. They are built to a standard where that is just not going to be an issue. We can guarantee the reliability of the connection between the contacts on both mating sides of that. Also, they have I believe off the top of my head it's an IP67 rating ingress protection. Basically that means that they can be fully submerged I think it's under a metre of water for 30 minutes with no water ingress. Obviously we're not wiring up submarines here, but particularly in the off-road racing world, they're going to get wet, they're going to get pressure washed after an event. So these are the sort of things that do make a difference.

Speaker 2: 1:20:05

On top of that as well and this is again something that you wouldn't even consider in most instances is that a factory connector on the engine. Depending on the specifics of it, it might actually only be rated to maybe 10 or 20 disconnections and re-engagements for reliability, whereas the Autosport connector, I think they're rated at 500 or 500 plus. And obviously factory cars we shouldn't necessarily be taking the harness off too often, but in a motorsport application we absolutely do so. I think those are a couple of things I wanted to just add into the mix there. Moving on from this again, this is a daunting world for those who maybe want to start working with autosport connectors but never have. Can you give us a quick rundown on the tooling that's required in order to work with these properly and reliably?

Speaker 1: 1:20:52

Yeah. So you know I get asked about what tooling is necessary for the Autosport connectors and even the Mil-Spec connectors. Because, believe it or not, you know I get a lot of people that want to do quote unquote the world famous wire tuck. They want to add one of these connectors to an already existing OEM harness and then, you know, get that cool look of the autosport connector. Yes, there are lower end tools out there available to you that can get you by, but I always tell people that you know what you get, what you pay for.

Speaker 1: 1:21:29

I obviously I use all the Daniels manufacturing the DMC crimpers, all the ideal strippers, stuff like that, the DMC populating tools, because really, when you get down to it, you're spending that kind of money on a connector or a series of connectors. You might as well just have the correct tools that were designed specifically for it, because you're going to get a better finish product but you're also going to have a better. I guess your time spent will be more efficient. You're probably going to find yourself using a lot less swear words while you're trying to get these things to work. You might be less tempted to throw that crimper across the room when you didn't crimp it right or you didn't strip the wire right.

Speaker 1: 1:22:12

It's one of those instances where I feel like if you are a novice or a beginner or you haven't been doing it for a long time, it's still worth to buy the correct tools. Even if you're only going to do it once or twice and you turn around and put that tool up on Marketplace. Your experience is just going to be much better. Your experience is just going to be much better and your chances of having any faulty crimps or any faulty populations will be far less if you're using the correct higher end. You know specific tools yes, yeah, I.

Speaker 2: 1:22:41

I personally don't see the point in, you know, spending a significant amount of money on an autosport connector, which you are purchasing for the inherent reliability that that connector gives, and then essentially potentially flushing that all down the toilet by using a DMC knockoff that you bought off AliExpress for $29.95. That's just ludicrous. This does lead to the next problem, though, is that, while for the likes of yourself, or even us, doing this in a professional context, you can expense the DMC crimp tool out over literally hundreds of jobs because it's not going to wear out. It's a very reliable tool. That makes it a little bit harder for the home enthusiast who thinks, hey, I really want to step up my game and I want to build this professional harness. Now you're looking at spending a significant outlay in specific tooling for a one-off job. So that's a bit tricky, but that's something you kind of have to weigh up and make your own decision there. But yeah, the right tooling for the job, for me that's just a no-brainer. We have to have that.

Speaker 2: 1:23:52

Along with this DMC crimp tool comes positioning heads, which are required to, as the name implies, position the contact correctly so that the crimp is located in the right spot, and there are a range of these positioners and I know this is another question we get from those getting into it. It's daunting. How do I know what position I need for a given contact? So can you give us any tips there?

Speaker 1: 1:24:12

Well, you know. So again, I go back a lot to you. Know Joey, over at ProWireUSA, he's got a lot of great information on the website. If you're new to this, if you're just getting into it, you know he's got all the info there where you can pick out the connector you want. It'll show you the pins you need for that connector and then it'll even tell you the tool necessary to do it. So if you already have, like the DMC mini frame and all you need is the positioner, it'll tell you what positioner you need.

Speaker 1: 1:24:40

Granted someone like me, I just bit the bullet and bought all the positioners you know. So I mean, I went and just spent the thousands of dollars to have an array of positioners, and I don't expect average home mechanic to do that. But luckily, with the internet and even with social media, there's a lot of people out there that are willing to tell you hey, I bought this, I need this, what do I use? Oh well, you want the K24. That'll do that. That is the great thing about social media and the great thing about the internet is the resources For do that. That is the great thing about social media and the great thing about the internet is the resources. For the most part, you're going to find some really nice people that are going to be willing to give you all the information you need. Again, same thing. I know Joel over at Raceback has a lot of the same information on his website where it'll tell you if you want to use this connector, you're going to need this crimper, you're going to want to use this pin. If you're using this pin, you can use this range of wire. Then you're going to use this back shell or this shrink boot. A lot of these websites are getting really, really good with just cross-referencing everything you're going to need to do the job successfully.

Speaker 1: 1:25:39

And then, if that ever fails, a lot of these guys again I mean how I got to where I am is from guys like Joey, where I just called up like hey, what do I need to do this? Because this isn't making any sense with what I bought. He's like oh yeah, because you bought the wrong thing. Oh well, thanks, we all got to start somewhere. Exactly, and that's always been my big thing is I do my absolute best with my followers.

Speaker 1: 1:26:01

I get guys all the time that ask me just simple little things, and sometimes I'll get that DM in my inbox that says hey. In my inbox that says hey. Sorry to waste your time, but I got a really stupid question. You know, and and I'm a firm believer in you know what, if you're asking the question, the least I can do is at least give you an answer or point you in the right direction. I might not be there to hold your hand and show you how to do it. I might not have the time to send you a video, but I can tell you you know you're going to need this you're how to do it. Or I'll send you a link to like a YouTube video where it's being done, or I'll send you a link to one of my videos where I do it.

Speaker 2: 1:26:33

Yeah, I'm sure that's greatly appreciated. And I simply have a bookmark in my Chrome taskbar with a link to the TE Connectivity Autosport Internet Connection Solutions manual, and that's such a great resource. It's all there. First of all, I mean, when you're dealing with Auto Sport Connectors, it's a whole new world when you're getting into it and even understanding what the part number means in terms of whether it's a plug or whether it's a receptacle, whether it's free or whether it's got a two bolt bulkhead flange on it, then whether it's a pin or a socket, and then also the colour coding for the keyway. That's a whole new world.

Speaker 2: 1:27:23

But that Autosport manual breaks that all down. It's really easy to understand. Then, for each of the different contacts, it tells you what your crimp tool should be, what the positioner is, and it just all falls into place. The information is out there and it's free. Might even try and put a link to this particular manual in the show notes, because it's just such a great resource. So it's the usual thing Read the manual. But if you don't know where to find the manual, then it can be a little bit hard to know where to go to.

Speaker 1: 1:27:52

Absolutely. And it's funny, like you mentioned, that you have that bookmark on my laptop. I have just an absolute monstrous folder of cheat sheets. So I go as far as I will only use a specific connector. You know, like whether, if it's on an engine, it is almost always. You know it's going to be the plug side and it's always going to be this keyway or this or that. And then I have what back shells, what boots work with that. So I know, okay, you know I'm going to use this 61 pin and it's always going to be the socket side, it's always going to have this back shell or this boot for a 90 or this for a straight. And I just click on my little thing and enter my part numbers in my list. Boom, there it goes.

Speaker 1: 1:28:33

You know I've created my own little like spreadsheet cheat sheets even for, like all the Deutsch connectors. You know I have what shrink boot works for which one. So I just click on my little my file, go into my Deutsch, whether it's DT, dtp, dtm, and it has all my my part numbers for whether it's a 90 shrink boot, if it's a straight shrink boot, if I'm going to do a reduced shrink boot and over time going back and referencing all these manuals, you kind of start to get things in your head where like, oh yeah, I'll always use this size boot, I always use this because this shell size works with this. And then you just kind of create, like me personally, just create these little cheat sheets because I'll never really deviate from going. Well, when I do this build on this engine. I want to use the pin in my disconnect versus the socket, like mine are almost always on the socket side, and it just kind of again streamlines that whole thing of what parts I'm grabbing for. You know.

Speaker 2: 1:29:24

Yeah, I think you develop your own process of doing these things. I mean, you're obviously so deep into this world and doing it that you probably don't even have to think. You don't probably even have to reference your cheat sheet some of the times. You know you've got X connector, you know it's going to have this particular boot on it and that's just sort of muscle memory for you. Obviously, it's going to take a few repetitions before you can get to that muscle memory. Now, another tool that you mentioned was the Ideal strip tool, which is the same one we use. They've got the Ideal. I think it's the Ergo Elite.

Speaker 2: 1:29:54

One of the things I reckon is really important when you're doing this sort of work is having a backstop for your wire stripper. Two aspects with this. When we're dealing with Tessal wire actually when we're dealing with almost any wire using a pair of side cutters to strip the insulation is absolutely not the way, and I know that at an entry level that's something that people do, but there's no place for that. When we're doing this sort of wiring, ultimately you're almost certainly going to end up damaging some of the conductor strands underneath and then, all of a sudden, a wire that should, on face value, be capable of supporting 8 amps potentially now can't, and also it might actually negatively impact on the reliability of the crimp. So the right tool for the job you need a proper wire stripper that's designed for working with that sort of wire.

Speaker 2: 1:30:46

The backstop, though, is really important because it allows you to set and get consistent strip length, and if you're dealing with an autosport connector that might have 79 positions or something like that, that's a lot of repetition, and trying to get these the same is important. Now, why that's important is, again, there's documentation on this but the strip length we should actually end up with a small amount of exposed conductor strand off the back of the contact that we're crimping. The idea behind this is twofold. First of all, between that and the little inspection hole in the terminal, the contact we can ensure that we've got full engagement, but we also don't want the insulation butted up hard to the back of that contact, because that in and of itself can end up placing strain into the wire if there's any relative movement. So there's all these little things and, just again, having that strip tool that we can get that consistent repetition of the strip is really, really critical. Do you agree with that?

Speaker 1: 1:31:42

Oh, absolutely. But at the same time I'm also the guy that's like you know. I mean, I may or may not have dropped my strip tool. You know a hundred times and there's been plenty of times where you know what. Hey, I broke my backstop. So guess what I'm doing for the next week? I'm running without it. But you know cause I get people that ask me too you know, how do you do this, how do you do that?

Speaker 1: 1:32:02

You know the backstop is super, super important, especially when it comes to developing that ability to cite something and do it time and time again. If you need, like a three millimeter strip, you can look at it. Boom, boom, boom. So there's times where I might be out in the field and I might not bring my super high end tools with me. I have, basically I've got three, four, sometimes even five of the same tool and I have a full kit that I'll bring with me to events. So if I need to service someone's car while I'm there, I mean, sometimes these are tools that again, that have been dropped quite a few times. They still work, but they're a little bit on the ugly side. They're not the brand new ones and they might not have the backstop. But when you look at it and you've done this a thousand times it gets a little bit easier.

Speaker 1: 1:32:51

But that backstop on those strippers, when you can look at it, you can identify that this is the position for a 22 gauge, and you set that backstop. You just hit it every single time. There's nothing better than just being able to do that and ensure that every single time, you're getting a consistent strip, and never once do you have to like, ah, I didn't strip that enough or you stripped it too much, you got to trim it next. You know everything kind of like. You know you go down this rabbit hole of of trying to remedy this slight little mix-up. At the same time, though, you know I I do get jealous of some of these guys that have these automated systems where it's just shooting wire at them. I'm like man, when do I get to that level?

Speaker 2: 1:33:27

yeah, I mean there mean there's always levels to this. There's always something to aspire to. I mean, I guess if you're doing a lot of production style runs, then that's when that sort of equipment does start to make sense. All right, just to round out, the Autosport Connector on the back of these, and again, most people listening probably will have seen some photos of a fully populated Autosport connector with nice, neatly arranged service loops on the back of these and then feeding out into your concentric twist. So talk to us about these service loops. Why are we incorporating those and what do they do?

Speaker 1: 1:34:04

So the service loop is always a super hot topic. Most people who are on the outside looking in, who might not do this professionally but maybe they're thinking about doing it or they're just the people that are like a fan of this type of work. They don't know what it's for or they might have grabbed onto someone else's definition of it and that might be incorrect. But the service loop plays two very, very important roles. So the first role the service loop creates is a strain relief. If the wire is in a loop and for some weird reason, let's say, some big handed mechanic decides to try and yank on something that loop, what it does is, when done properly, when it's in a back shell or it's in a molded boot that's been epoxied, the load from that loom being pulled on. Or let's say even we could take it a step further let's say we've got a component failure that has caused a portion of the vehicle or the engine or something to come loose or move. The strain is then transferred directly from your sheathing or your shrink wrap, your Raychem, through the boot directly to the connector housing. You won't see any strain transferred through the conductor into the pin or into your crimp. So your primary is going to be your strain relief. But at the same time we don't call them strain loops, we call them service loops because the other reason why we use them a lot it's weird how often you don't find yourself doing this, but when you do, you're super grateful that you put that loop in there. But every once in a while you might need to change the configuration of your pinout, whether it be for whatever reason.

Speaker 1: 1:35:43

You repurpose something, and I've done it before. We've built cars that a year later we've decided know we're no longer using this for this sensor. But now we've added another sensor. Perfect example I got another trophy truck that I'm working with and it used to have a power steering reservoir in the back of the truck and a cooler. And we had the power steering fluid temp back there so we could tell the differentiation between the temperature coming out of the pump and then returning back to the reservoir. So we knew that our cooler was working. Well, we're no longer running that system. Now everything's going to the front of the truck.

Speaker 1: 1:36:18

Now we've decided to add shock temperature sensors, so that particular one is now going to be used for shock temp. Well, we're going to change a few things around at the same time. So we're allowed to then basically remove our back or our streak boot from our bulkhead connector and I can repin that somewhere else. That extra loop of wire will allow you to get enough movement that you can then change the location of that without again like oh man, now you've got a bunch of strain on this because, say, you've moved that pin 10 pins over to something else because that's no longer going to be a 5 volt. Now you need a 12 volt reference, but your 12 volt is 10 pins over. That service loop allows you to move that without having to pull or stretch a wire across the back of a connector. Those are the two major advantages and purposes for the service loop.

Speaker 2: 1:37:08

I also came from a selfish perspective here to get any professional tips you might have on creating these service loops and making them look pretty. I'm sure it comes with experience and just time on the job. I still really struggle to get anything that I can look back on and go. You know what? I've done a great job here. This looks amazing. Let's post it on Instagram. Yeah, what can you say to that?

Speaker 1: 1:37:35

Again, planning is everything.

Speaker 1: 1:37:37

If you've already done all the time of planning out your harness, planning out your pinouts, you already know what wire is going to go where.

Speaker 1: 1:37:44

Most of the way I build my harnesses is, I always start from the highest population connector and work my way from that. Whether that be a bulkhead, whether that be the back of a digital dash or if that's coming from a PDM or an ECU, I always start from the most populated connectors and you have to, at the same time, use that thing on top of your shoulders and look at okay, if I'm going to do a 90 off of this connector, you're always going to want to start with what I would call the bottom of that 90 and work your loops and populate the connector as you go. So I'll start with the first row. I'll populate all those wires you know already been stripped, cramped, pin those in, then do my loop, then move up to the next row, if you will. A lot of people think you know, oh, you just start from the inside out or you work from one side or the other and that is somewhat true, depending on the configuration of that shrink boot or whatever scenario you're in.

Speaker 2: 1:38:39

Definitely a very different style of pinning out for a straight boot versus the 90. And I mean I guess without the benefit of pictures to show that it should be pretty straightforward. But I mean, if you're doing a 90 degree boot and you start in the middle, by the time you get to the outside where it's bending back on itself on 90 degrees, you have got no room to work with that. So you kind of have to use a bit of common sense there. Another little tip I'll give as well, because it's always nice to be able to visualise how much space you've got to work with.

Speaker 2: 1:39:13

And again, if you're using Hellermann or TE boots, both sites have a document showing what these look like and you can print them out as a silhouette and then I'll just scale them to what is going to be the finish size for the back shell on the Autosport, on the connector, and then you can sort of use that, cut it out and just hold it up and you're like, okay, this is how much room I've got to work with. So you're sort of not making this big bird's nest that you're going to really end up with a whole lot of trouble when you come to shrink the boot Again, I mean at your level, I'm guessing this is sort of just second nature to you. But that's a nice little tip, I find, for those just getting started.

Speaker 1: 1:39:52

Yeah, a lot of it is very much second nature. You know, you kind of already know what you're up against. You've done so many of them, you know what it looks like. But I'll even tell you one of the tricks I used to use those shrink boots. Granted, they're not super cheap. No-transcript should be. I know where. I have to get all of my service loops finished and then begin my concentric twist. That way I know I have the correct overlap for my Raychem into my shrink boot and you know what? Then you have those in your toolbox forever if you don't lose them and you can reference them at any point in time. Yeah, it's solid. But I'm also again, I'm a very, very transparent person. A lot of the things that you'll see on Instagram, you know what, like we do our best. We got those really pretty service loops. Everything looks really nice. But a lot of times we take those pictures before we go, put, like, our capton tape on them. Once you hit those things, you start wrapping with the capton.

Speaker 2: 1:40:57

Trust me, they get kind of ugly, but it still serves the purpose that it's there for yeah, I mean, again, it's one of these parts that, once the harness is finished, no one's going to see, so does it matter? Well, yeah, I mean, there's a bit of pride there and you know what's under that, but, yeah, it's not always like what you're going to see on Instagram. One more part with this obviously, the boot, which we've talked about a bunch of times, and you've sort of really already given us the rundown on this. They're there for, again, that strain relief, so that when the harness gets pulled, the strain is passed through the epoxy into the boot, then into the autosport connector, rather than ever being applied directly to the conductors, and once these are recovered using heat, they essentially become almost solid, so there's not really any flexibility in them.

Speaker 2: 1:41:42

When you're choosing boots, there's a huge range of these, again documentation on what they're going to shrink down to, so it's pretty easy to figure out, for a given connector, what range of boots is going to work. My question here, though, is these boots are available in both glued and or glue lined and non-glued variations, and I'm just wondering where you would use a glue lined versus a non-glued boot and what you're doing with those non-glued boots and what you're, what you're doing with those non-glued boots.

Speaker 1: 1:42:14

so actually I never use glued boots, I always use non-glued and I apply my own um epoxy to like my raychem boots. The only thing that I do use that does have a like a self-flowing glue in it is I use, uh, the ray SCL and I'll use that whenever my Raychem comes to an end on a connector that doesn't have the ability to have a boot put on it and I just use that just literally to kind of create I mean more or less to seal the end of my Raychem. So again, no fluids, no dust can make their way up into the harness, but it also kind of helps anchor the Raychem to the conductor. But other than that, yeah, none of my formed boots that I ever use are glued. I always use non-glued and then I just use the 125 epoxy.

Speaker 2: 1:43:00

Is that just a personal preference and giving you, I guess, a little bit more control over the application of the epoxy? Or do you think you end up with a better, more reliable finish versus using a glue line boot?

Speaker 1: 1:43:12

for me it is more personal preference on the process. I prefer the ability to, you know, shrink a majority of it, and again, everyone does it differently. I always start mine from the actual, the back of my connector or the back or, and then I'll work my way back. Also, the other thing is sometimes, believe it or not, I might shrink it down to about 90% and then use a syringe to then inject my epoxy, because for me I get a little bit better, I guess, flow and without using way too much or creating way too much cleanup at the end of it. I know some guys like to apply the epoxy before they even start the shrinking and then sometimes you end up with a ton of post flow and then you're sitting there with your swab trying to clean up this massive mess, and then for me I like to get it shrunk most of the way, and then I do, I use a small little syringe to inject just enough of the epoxy, then do my final shrink and then just give it one quick wipe and I'm done.

Speaker 2: 1:44:17

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. It's really easy to create a bit of a mess when you're applying that epoxy, particularly if you do it before the boot's recovered at all, because there's a lot of movement that goes in while you're recovering it down. So, yeah, I guess my personal preference. I tend, wherever possible, to use the glue lined. I just feel that I end up with a little less clean up on my hands, which I'm pretty happy about. Yeah, ultimately, again, just complete personal preference. Alright, I think we've probably done autosport connectors to death.

Speaker 2: 1:44:44

Another common area I think enthusiasts get a little bit scared off with wiring is you're trying to figure out what gauge wire they need for a particular circuit, and this is a valid concern. Obviously, you need to make sure that the wiring is sized to handle the current that you're expecting in that circuit, and this is where those who are maybe fresh to wiring go. Well, okay, cool, but how on earth do I know what current is going to flow in a circuit and these are where Ohm's laws are a pretty good one here which is simply voltage equals current times, resistance, and we can rearrange that If we know the voltage which in our electrical system, when the engine's running should be approximately 13.8 to 14.2 volts. So let's call it 14 volts. Divide that by the resistance or impedance of a particular output. Let's say that's an injector and that's going to give us the current for that particular circuit.

Speaker 2: 1:45:39

When we're dealing with products maybe that, maybe a headlight, for example you're going to have a power rating for that which is a wattage and the other formula there is power equals voltage times current. So again, we can rearrange that. So it's not too difficult to actually work out what the current's going to be. Alternatively, if you're using aftermarket products fuel pumps, light bars, etc you're almost certainly going to be able to find the manufacturer's sort of expectations for current draw. So for a start, once you kind of know what current there's going to be in a circuit, are you applying any sort of a safety factor to that before you actually size the wire gauge?

Speaker 1: 1:46:18

Oh, absolutely, that's always. The main concern is, again, making sure that these looms are safe and they're going to be reliable for an indefinite amount of time. The rule of thumb that I always use, depending on the module or the accessory that I'm powering if it's like a fan or a fuel pump I always will choose a wire gauge that's capable of carrying at least one and a half times the current of what that fan or fuel pump is possible of when you get into like a led light bar. You're not really going to get into that issue where you know you got that inrush current that you know might spike to higher than you know. Say, if it's a 10 amp light bar at turn on, it's not going to hit 17 amps, you know it's just going to. Basically it might hit 11 and then settle at its 10. But yeah, for anything that's got like any you know startup, if you will, you're going to get that in rush and I always try, like I said, gauge to one and a half, if not more, in excess.

Speaker 1: 1:47:17

Again, there's so many good resources out there that I do cheat sheets all the time. You know I have. I have sheets on my, my laptop again, where I can just look at it. You know, even though been doing this for such a long time, I kind of just know what works. You know when you're wiring a fuel pump, a cooling fan or wiring you know coiling ignition system. You know, you just kind of know what's worked, especially if it's the same thing you've done. You know 100 times. You know I've done a hundred of these A1000. You don't even need to think about it, yeah, you don't. You just know right away. This is what gauge I'm reaching for because I'm still within this distance from the pump. But there's a bunch of really good resources out there. I've used PowerStreamcom, I've used WireBarn Again, even on ProWireUSA they have a wire calculator that you just enter in what current load you're trying to handle and the length and it'll tell you the acceptable wire gauges you can use for that length to handle and the length and it'll tell you the acceptable wiring gauges you can use for that length.

Speaker 1: 1:48:12

Obviously in motorsports wiring we try and use the smallest one possible, which is always kind of a funny one coming from the hot rod world, because you in the hot rod world you would buy a lot of these. You know components and they would tell you oh, you know, for this fuel pump you got to run a minimum eight gauge power wire. And now, like having done this for such a long time, you look at your eight gauge. What am I using?

Speaker 1: 1:48:36

Eight gauge for this nine amp fuel pump for, Like this makes eight gauge makes zero sense at all, Somewhat overkill. You know, you do the math and you're like 12 gauge or 14 gauge is more than capable of running this, depending on you. You know where your power source starts at and again we always fault to try and run the smallest possible for weight and size saving. But I still tend to follow my own rule of it's got to be able to carry one and a half times the current, you know. Then you go back to that thing where we talked about earlier about future proofing it, because sometimes we'll talk to a client and well, this is what I want to do now, but there's a possibility that I might want to turbocharge it and add a lot more power and that's a lot bigger fuel pump. So it's like you know what, Maybe I will run a 10-gauge wire back there, Even though right now we only need 8 amps. Maybe when we decide to put a big, nasty fuel pump in it, we'll have the ability to run 20 amps.

Speaker 2: 1:49:32

Yeah, I think that's all about that planning and just understanding the entire system. With your safety factor there of one and a half times, I think that makes perfect sense. What people probably need to think is the fuel pump, for example. Yeah, okay, as I mentioned, you're probably going to be able to get a spec sheet from the manufacturer and that'll probably be current versus fuel pressure. Obviously, as you work the pump harder, it's going to draw more current. So let's say that comes out at sort of 10 amps, just for nice round numbers. Well, I mean, that's yes, that's where it should be operating. But as the pump ages, maybe as the the gets blocked, it has to work harder. So that could easily ramp up to, instead of 10 amps, maybe 12 amps. So straight away you've got a 20% increase in your current that you're drawing. Now we also obviously still have that circuit protected either with a mechanical fuse or these days probably much more likely power distribution modules where you can set that fusing current. So that's going to ultimately protect the circuit, but you've just got that fuse. Or, these days probably much more likely power distribution modules where you can set that fuse in current. So that's going to ultimately protect the circuit, but you've just got that little bit of additional headroom in there for a safety factor.

Speaker 2: 1:50:37

You also mentioned inrush current, which is something you're going to see with inductive motors, so the likes of most conventional fuel pumps or a radiator fan, for example, and it's quite interesting if you actually haven't logged that and actually seen what happens. I mean, a fan might draw a steady state 6 amps, for example but that inrush current could hit 18 or 20 even. And the next obvious question is well okay, do I need to size my wiring for that inrush current? And the answer is no, because that inrush current, while it might be significantly over what that wire on paper can handle, it might only last for 100, maybe 150 milliseconds, so it's so brief that it doesn't. It's not there for long enough for that wire to actually overheat. So the inrush current is important to understand, but not necessarily something that we need to pay too much attention to when we're actually sizing the wire gauge correct, exactly you know it's always smart to be fully aware of it.

Speaker 1: 1:51:38

And again, it kind of goes into you know what you were saying when it ages, you know, because a brand new cooling fan might see that inrush for a few milliseconds. Now, a cooling fan, you know, depending on fan, depending on your vehicle. For example, I go back a lot to the trophy trucks because these off-road vehicles, these trucks, are going out there and they're doing a thousand miles in a 24-hour period. That fan may rarely shut off throughout that 20-hour session that it's on. So if that fan does cycle over that period, or let's say you take the truck apart, you test everything, everything's fine, it goes back together. The next time that truck goes out to race that startup, that inrush might last a few seconds longer. So again to me, granted, the inrush isn't there long enough that you need to really think about like, ooh, maybe I should go up a gauge, it's definitely enough to think about if. Ooh, maybe I should go up a gauge, you know, it's definitely enough to think about if, again, like you brought up a really good point too.

Speaker 1: 1:52:33

You know, we used to, back the day, use the push button, circuit breakers and then fuses and even all of those Granted. There's circuit protection. There's still there's timing involved, whereas with the modern PDM we have the ability to set our protection level and also set the amount of time that we allow for that inrush. You know, because you could set it for a few milliseconds, you could set it for a whole second if you'd like but you've got that protection there if that inrush current lasts longer than anticipated if it, if it doesn't, if it doesn't diminish soon enough, yeah, the, the protection circuit will kick off.

Speaker 1: 1:53:05

You get a light flashing on the dasher, on your keypad. You know, okay, something's wrong, the fan's struggling, maybe the fan's got a, you know, some dirt stuck in the motor or something like that. But yeah, for the most part, yeah, that the, the interest will diminish to a point where it's kind of disputable whether or not you should really pay attention to it, but it's still always something I think that's really smart to to be aware of yeah, I think what you mentioned there.

Speaker 2: 1:53:28

You know the inrush current for a fan, if it's fully jammed, that's going to be the worst case scenario and your inrush current is going to hang around. But obviously at that point that's where your circuit protection is going to end up coming into play. Now the other one that I get a lot of questions about here is sizing wires for circuits, let's say, for example, for our injectors. So we obviously have to supply a 12 volt feed to one side of our injector and the other side is switched by the ECU to actually open and close the injector. And again, we can use Ohm's law there to calculate the likely current. And I just put a real simple scenario here. If we have an injector making the numbers nice and easy, that's got a 14 ohm impedance which we can easily measure with a cheap multimeter. No problem there.

Speaker 2: 1:54:17

As mentioned, we're probably going to expect our voltage when the engine's running to be 14 volts. So if we use Ohm's law there, 14 volts divided by 14 ohm's impedance gives us one amp that we're going to expect for that. So not a lot. So now we might look at that and go well, we've got eight injectors, so we need to supply 12 volts to all eight. We could actually do that from the bulky connector with one single conductor and then split that off eight ways. So now that wire where it runs from the bulky connector needs to be able to support eight amps. But that's all an assumed 100% injected duty cycle, and if we're at 50% injected duty cycle we're obviously around about half of that current. I'm just interested do you size everything for that worst case scenario where we're stuck at 100% injected duty cycle, or is there a little bit more leniency there, because you know that you shouldn't be there?

Speaker 1: 1:55:05

again, for me I think it's all based on the scenario and the type of vehicle.

Speaker 1: 1:55:09

If it's something that's more like an endurance race car, for example, if you're going into a rally car or, let's say, again back to the trophy trucks, I always plan for the worst case, because you might not have the ability to shut the thing down and let everything reset, cool down whatever.

Speaker 1: 1:55:26

On a drag car. I size everything as small as humanly possible because again, it's only going to be, you know, if it does get at that a hundred percent duty cycle because, say, the tune is off or something goes haywire midway through the run, it's only got to do it for five to six seconds. So again you kind of look at it and go if the car's even only running for 30 seconds, it's not that big of a deal. You don't build that harness for that 100% duty cycle. But when you get into these more endurance style where if it gets hung up at the 100% duty cycle you might be driving on that 100% duty cycle for 30 minutes before you get to a point where someone can rectify the issue, then yeah, I always plan and build out for the worst case scenario.

Speaker 2: 1:56:10

Okay Makes sense. I think as much of this is also just about understanding what the implications of a duty cycle to a component like that mean to the current flow through the wiring. And then you can make your own decision that suits your application and whatever level of safety factor you want to incorporate into that With this as well. When it comes to sort of sizing wiring, less is not necessary, always more Obviously smaller gauge wiring. If we can get away with it and it's going to handle the current, then great, because it can save us some weight. So case in point with this might be a sensor. So the current draw through the likes of a MAP sensor is relatively nominal.

Speaker 2: 1:56:52

So the gauge of the wire really isn't a huge consideration here. We could easily drop that down from 20 to 22 or even 24 gauge and that's going to get us a modest gain or saving in weight. I'm just interested. The downside with that is there's less mechanical strength in that wiring. And where I'm going to here is it's easy for a mechanic who's maybe a little bit heavy handed to not disconnect a sensor properly and tug on the harness, and with 24 gauge wires it's possible he might end up breaking it versus if that was run in 22 gauge wire the additional strength might be sufficient that it's just got that little bit extra reliability. I'm interested do you sort of put any weight on that sort of the reliability versus the wire gauge?

Speaker 1: 1:57:36

Oh, absolutely. Again, you know, like the trophy truck that I just finished for the guys over at GFO Perfect example I could have easily built that entire engine harness out of primarily 20, 22 and 24 gauge wire Because, again, the needs of all the sensors, the injectors, the coils weren't anything massive. But knowing that these are off road guys, you know if something happens to that truck while it's in the middle of Baja and they need to change, you know, a coil, they need to change a, an alternator or something like that, they're not going to be super dainty, they're going to be wearing gloves, they're going to be grabbing things, they're going to be against the clock rushing. So that engine harness, actually, on that trophy truck that I just finished, it's built almost entirely out of 20 gauge, just for the sake of I'm going to build it big. So if these guys do, if they're struggling with the connector and they're going to get a little frustrated and pull on it, I'm not going to be worried about them potentially, you know, either breaking a wire or pulling a crimp out.

Speaker 1: 1:58:36

Now on, you know, like some of these time attack and like standing mile cars, you know where weight is, everything. That, yeah, then you know you. You definitely keep everything as small as possible, as light as possible, and you definitely go the extra mile and explain to everybody who's ever going to touch it. You got to be very, very delicate with it, or you just call me.

Speaker 2: 1:58:55

Educating the customer, I think, is actually a pretty important aspect of anything we do here. An educated customer is going to be able to do a better job of working on the finished product and everyone's going to be happier when they don't end up breaking your brand new harness Absolutely, but yeah, no, I do. Everyone's going to be happier when they don't end up breaking your brand new harness absolutely.

Speaker 1: 1:59:11

But, yeah, no, I I do, depending on on the vehicle and depending on the scenarios I think it's going to be in, I do. I will make changes to the way I build and design a harness for that particular application.

Speaker 2: 1:59:21

Yeah, if you take this to extremes, you know you look at a harness built for a formula one car. I mean, there the weight is the only consideration and they have to minimise that at all costs. But you're also dealing with a much more qualified set of mechanics working on that car who understand the implications and problems that that creates. So you know they learn to work with that system and then they get the advantage of that lower weight, which again for that sort of form of motorsport so critical, less so when we're talking about the likes of a trophy truck. All right, Eric, I think we'll move towards wrapping this up, because I am just wanting to respect your time here and we have gone quite long. So we've got the same three questions that we ask all of our guests. The first is what's next in the future for you and Hardwired Performance?

Speaker 1: 2:00:11

Well, I mean, as always, you know, I'm always, you know, getting my hands into some, you know, new interesting, fun projects. You know I got a couple in the works right now. I've got one that I'm about to wrap up in the next few weeks. That I've actually had to be very tight, lipped about for a while, but it should. You fingers crossed. This thing should be done in the next couple weeks and I will be making a ton of noise about this project. And then, you know, I've actually got a gt3 car that's on the books. So that was exciting for me because that's kind of always been something I've always wanted to get my hands into is that level of racing. But yeah, you know, I mean I'm not going, I'm not going anywhere. You know I'll be here, I, I'll be doing what I do.

Speaker 2: 2:00:50

So more of the same. Have you got any sort of ambition to sort of ramp up? You mentioned after the pandemic you sort of downsized a little bit and got rid of staff. Is there any ambition to ramp back up, maybe get your own facility again, maybe bring on additional staff? Or are you happy just as a one man band with complete control over everything that you touch?

Speaker 1: 2:01:14

You know I would absolutely love to ramp things back up, but in doing so it's going to be something I'm going to be experimenting with a few things. But the other thing that I really really would like to do and it's something I've been slowly working on for a while is actually building up my own time attack car. So that's also kind of the nice thing about scaling back is it's allowing me to spend a little bit of time getting this thing, kind of getting all my ducks in a row to go do this, because, again, my passion has always been road racing and stuff like that. I come from a lot of building those cars and I'd like to get back into that. I love the trophy trucks thing, but the honest truth is I'm never going to own a trophy truck, so I'll just keep working on everybody else's.

Speaker 1: 2:01:58

But I would love to get my own time attack car done so I can get out there, see what other people are doing mess with more products, get my hands on more stuff, cause I love learning new systems, learning new tricks of how to make things work, work better. I guess we'll see how that all pans out, I guess, because first and foremost, you know I still, I want to make sure my quality of work stays where it is. So if that means I stay the only guy here and I get my car going and I just go out there and fiddle around, and so be it. If it turns into you know what, I get a big shop again and I get a couple of guys, then we'll get to that when that moment arises.

Speaker 2: 2:02:35

Okay, I'm going to add a couple of things here. First of all, I love the idea of getting your own time attack car. Trophy trucks are expensive. Time attack cars can also be expensive, but I think that the key point and it doesn't really matter if you're producing wiring harnesses or you're building race engines or you're tuning cars there's a certain advantage, I believe, to being able to learn and hone your skills and perfect them on your own equipment, as opposed to paying customers. Clearly, you've already got all of those skills refined, but, as you mentioned, it's always nice to be able to start playing with new products and techniques et cetera as they come on the market and really dial that in on your own product. So you're not using a customer as a guinea pig.

Speaker 2: 2:03:16

The other point I wanted to add here is that sometimes a big, shiny premise with eight staff and there's projects all over the place that might be good for the ego, but maybe actually worse for the bank account.

Speaker 2: 2:03:29

More is definitely not always better. So I think it's really important to be very mindful of the way you grow a business, so that you don't just end up with this huge operation that's causing a huge amount of stress, taking up all of your time and you're actually making the same amount of money you were as a one-man band. So yeah, it's very important just to decide on what makes sense for you and your specific aims and outcomes, because also, you know, money is only one driver. I think as you get older, particularly sort of getting a work-life balance is also important, and that can be tricky when you are a one-man band. So sometimes maybe having staff to pick up some of the excess can be a real benefit. But again, you know, it's on a very individual basis and only you can decide what makes sense there. Next question, eric is there any advice you'd give to a younger version of yourself to help reach where you are today in your career faster or potentially avoid some of the pitfalls you've seen along the way?

Speaker 1: 2:04:35

So this is actually, you know what like. This is a really funny question because I have recently actually thought about this, because this question came up in a different conversation. But it's funny because, you know, earlier we were talking about how, you know, I fell in love with cars because my dad was into cars. But my dad always pushed me and my younger brother to you know, go a different route, don't do the car thing. Maybe you know, pay more attention to you know, go a different route, don't do the car thing. Maybe you know, pay more attention to you know, learning computers and stuff like this.

Speaker 1: 2:04:54

Now, in this day and age, now, knowing that everything that we do is all computer controlled, like maybe I would have told younger me like, hey, bud, uh, yeah, maybe pay a little bit more attention to computers because you one day will rely almost entirely on these things to basically make your car work. It's one thing when 10 years ago it's like I knew how to tune a carburetor and I can do this, I can mess with points, ignition, but now it's like everything is based off of the laptop. You plug into it and you make a car run off it. There was a slight disadvantage when all of a sudden, I'm this guy that's used to these carbureted big block Chevys and now I'm like, okay, hold on, now I gotta learn how to do all this with the computer. Like all right, there's these young kids that just know all this stuff already.

Speaker 2: 2:05:33

But I think outside of that I probably would have, just you know, just told myself, maybe just you know, like have more fun yeah, it's always tricky looking back and, you know, maybe thinking about what you could have done differently, which is, I mean, almost a moot point, because you know you don't get to aB test this sort of stuff and you can only make the decisions that you make in the moment with the information you've got. The aim of this question, of course, is to maybe help some of the younger listeners who are looking at a potential path like your own and seeing if there's anything they could do differently. I think you're absolutely right with the technology side of things and that's what I've seen as well with the tuning industry, which is obviously more. My specialty is the tuning shops around the world.

Speaker 2: 2:06:13

You know tuners when I first started getting involved with tuning myself 25 odd years ago and you know these were people that were at the absolute cutting edge. They were top of their game and you know I also saw as the technology evolved and the computers, you know, became a little bit more complex and the tuning methods changed and a lot of them would sort of almost top out at a certain level and not want to learn the next skills. And I've tried real hard in my career as well to never be closed minded and always to keep my finger on the pulse, so to speak, and stay up to date with what's changing. Obviously, that's great for HPA as well and, of course, our members, but again, that's a very individual choice. But I think, paraphrasing here to get back to it, I think keeping an open mind and trying to absorb as much information around you as you can, never trying to close down to a particular technology, is really what we're trying to say here, correct? Yeah?

Speaker 1: 2:07:06

absolutely. I think that's such a big thing. That kind of what you touched on too is not being closed-minded, being open-minded. I think there's so many people that are still so stuck on.

Speaker 1: 2:07:18

What I learned is the right way, and everything else beyond that is not that you're going to get left behind, because, trust me, there was a point in time where I was there, where it was like I was so stuck in my ways that I wasn't willing to look at anything else.

Speaker 1: 2:07:28

Because there was a point in time where I was there, where it was like, you know, I was so stuck in my ways that I wasn't willing to look at anything else. You know, because there was. There was a point in time where I was so against all these PDMs because I'm like well, what happens if the system breaks? It leaves you in the middle of nowhere when you can't run. But now we're seeing the opposite effect where it's like okay, now these PDMs are becoming, you know, the ultimate systems, you know, where they rarely ever have any kind of issue. But now you're having issues where it's like man, this push button breaker in my dash won't reset, and now I don't have a functioning ignition system, like now I got to hold my finger on this thing while I drive, you know.

Speaker 2: 2:07:59

Yeah, yeah, agreed, agreed, all right. Last question for today. If people want to follow you and see what you're up to, how they're best to do so? What are your social media accounts, website, etc.

Speaker 1: 2:08:11

The only thing I have right now is I have my Instagram and I kind of like to keep it that way, but it's hardwiredperformance. On Instagram, it's pretty easy to find me, and then you can also use the hashtag wiringgangster. I tag all my stuff with that.

Speaker 2: 2:08:25

Okay, perfect. Yeah, I mean less again is more in this respect, and I mean, if you've got more work than you can cope with at the moment, going out of your way to generate more with a website maybe not the smartest, highest and best use of your time. So we, as usual, will link to your Instagram account in the show notes and I can confirm it's definitely worth a deep dive on that account. Some pretty cool stuff in there. Well, look, erica, it's been great to chat, do appreciate your time and your insight there and, you know, wish you all the best for whatever does come in the future, whether it's continue as a one-man band or maybe in another five years we'll catch up and you'll have 20 staff working under you.

Speaker 1: 2:09:04

Right on. I really, really appreciate the time and the opportunity to come on here and talk with you guys. Like I said, I've followed you for a while and I've always felt that you've been one of the top that comes to educating people out there, and having this opportunity was an awesome one to again add a little bit to that.

Speaker 2: 2:09:20

Yeah, no, I really appreciate some great detail in this interview. So, no, it's going to be super helpful for those who want to up their wiring game. Thanks again If you enjoyed this episode of Tune In with Eric. We'd love it if you could drop a review on your chosen podcasting platform. These reviews really help us to grow our audience and that, in turn, helps us to continue to get more high quality guests To say thanks. Each week, we'll be picking a random reviewer and sending them out an HPA t-shirt free of charge, anywhere in the world. This is also a great place to ask any questions you might have too, and I'll do my best to answer them if your review gets picked. So this week, a big shout out to JC Goodchat from Australia, who said Building my turbo Honda CRX sleeper. This podcast has been invaluable Plenty of relatable, easy to follow information both here and on the online training platform. For budget garage racers like myself, great that you are finding value in the podcast and great to hear it's helping with your CRX build. If you get in touch with your t-shirt size and shipping details, we'll get a fresh tee shipped straight out to you, alright, that concludes our interview, and before we sign off.

Speaker 2: 2:10:26

I just wanted to mention for anyone who's been perhaps hiding under a rock and hasn't heard of High Performance Academy before. We are an online training school and we specialise in teaching a range of performance automotive topics, everything from engine tuning and engine building through to wiring, car suspension and wheel alignment, data analysis and race driver education. Now remember, you've got that coupon code. You can use PODCAST75 at the checkout to get $75 off the purchase of your first course. You'll find our full course list at hpacademycom. Forward slash courses. Important to mention that when you purchase a course from us, that course is yours for life as well. It never expires. You can rewatch the course as many times as you like, whenever you like.

Speaker 2: 2:11:10

The purchase of a course will also give you 3 months of access to our gold membership. That gives you access to our private members only forum, which is the perfect place to get answers to your specific questions. You'll also get access to our regular weekly members webinars, which is where we touch on a particular topic in the performance automotive realm. We dive into that topic for about an hour. If you can watch live, you can ask questions and get answers in real time. If the time zones don't work for you. That's fine too. You're going to get access as a gold member to our previous webinar archive. We've got close to 300 hours of existing content in that archive. It is an absolute goldmine. So remember that coupon code, podcast75,. Check out our course list at hpacademycom. Forward slash courses.