I?ve got a Renault Savanna. On the boot hatch there are 11 cables plus the hose for the rear window washer, which pass from the harness inside the car body into the boot hatch door. All this is housed in a rubber ?boot? adjacent to the left hand hatch hinge. These cables flex as the door is opened and closed and several have broken. This has happened before. The cables had been repaired before I got the car and I had previously re-repaired them by soldering the cables. My repair hasn?t lasted because the solder makes the flexible cables more like a solid core cable and so much less flexible.
What is the recognised method of repairing such cable breaks? Are there thin crimp-type connectors? I?d imagine that the text-book fix is to cut out the damaged length of cable so that the joints are not within the section of cable which is subject to flexing.
The really annoying thing is that there is a similar rubber boot adjacent to the other hinge, which contains only 1 cable. Routing 6 cables through each boot would probably have required some common sense and the expenditure of several more centimes.
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Ahhh a Savanna! That brings back some happy memories.
I had exactly the same problem on a Polo, every time the tailgate opened, the cables stretched. A few more pence spent and the factory and a few extra inches of wire would have stopped the problem.
I tried soldering them up, lasted a few months but that's all. You need to obtain some new wires of correct ampage and get then cut in. Crimps are ok if correctly rated. Mail order company Frost sell all you need. You may find Renault sell you a new harness but it will be expensive and your Savanna is getting on a bit now, may not be worth spending too much on.
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Same problem on a Xantia. Advice here was either solder (done already by garage and failed) or patch in new cable with crimps. Had not relaised how common it was on other estate/hatches. 15 yo BX went to the scrappy on oem wiring.Xant's boot lid probably has around 3000 open/close "cycles" on it.
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Thank you both for your replies. I've now fixed it by soldering the broken ends or soldering in a patch where necessary. This is only a temporary fix.
In answer to my own question, I now think the only proper job is to remove the internal trim, unravel the harness and patch in a length of wire so that there are no joints in the section of wire that is flexed when the door is opened. I couldn't muster the enthusiasm, so did a quick fix to get all the lights working.
There's actually 4 wires in the r.h. rubber boot and one of those was also broken; no idea what it does though. It must be a common problem with most cars, given the amount of electrical equipment and speakers now housed in doors. I wonder if an array of relays in the doors would be more reliable, the control cables could be very skinny with just 2 chunky cables carrying 12V and earth.
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IMO its more to do with stretching than flexing.Ie cables are so tight.Some cars suffer this on doors where not enough cable length is given.causing broken connection
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Steve
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I agree, Steve. I recently had to life test a loom in a machine which consisted of 9 0,5mm single strand wires.(fluorescent tube fitting type) They had to be twisted through about 120 degrees over a run of 100mm. We stopped the test after 175000 cycles. In our application that was about 25 years use.
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