Repairing knock sensor wiring

[thebrownman1]

Bros,

I'm currently in the midst of a maintenance and upgrade blitz. One of my tasks is to replace the knock sensor because I was getting a ton of phantom knock and I want to fix it instead of trucking the ecu in link.

So I didn't realize this when I was installing the engine because I'm still somewhat of a noob but the previous owner destroyed the connector on the harness and hard wired it in all willy nilly.

The under the brown insulation on the engine harness are a white wire that has another braided wire around it. It's really half assed so I want to fix it right. How do I go about this? Should I just pull more of the braided wire out, solder and heat shrink it to black on the pigtail?

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[steve]

It's a shielded cable with the signal carried on the inner wire and the outer braid is grounded.
Try locating some shielded microphone cable and use that.

 

[thebrownman1]

Is there a technique to soldering the braided line? It gets pretty frayed after its cut.

Follow up question. If the braid is a ground, would grounding it to the firewall be just as effective?

 

[steve]

If the braid is tinned copper you can solder it but if it's aluminum crimping is pretty much the only option. Looks like they soldered it before.

 

[1990TSIAWDTALON]

Your car will love you for paying attention to her! Glad to see Steve helping you make an informed decision. I deem that sensor an engine saver myself.

 

[thebrownman1]

Your car will love you for paying attention to her! Glad to see Steve helping you make an informed decision. I deem that sensor an engine saver myself.

Thanks! I'm currently getting help rebuilding my transmission from a friend that lives nearby so I figured I would tackle a long list of to-dos while its down. Having the transmission out of they makes access so much easier. It's also getting 1000cc injectors and an FP68.

I re soldered the connection following a tutorial on YouTube and put some head shrink around it. Hopefully this alleviates my issues.

 

[Dericsh]

How’d it turn out? Can you share the video?

 

[thebrownman1]

I think it turned out fine although I wont be able to test until it's back together. Steve suggested using microphone wire since this shielded so followed this one:

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