The bits arrived today to allow me to upgrade the reversing camera, key to the operation is a new bit of umbilical flexi, 6.5mm internal diameter allows enough room for video cable, camera power cable and number plate lamp wires.
With the aid of an antique specialist tool I was able to expand the rubber sleeves at the ends of the umbilical to fit over the slightly bigger flexi.
This is what I fitted when I bought the car, Garmin camera using an rf link to my Garmin Satnav.
with extra wires added to the umbilical
Tease off the rubber cover and then it’s easy to release the four tangs on the plastic clip to withdraw the end of the umbilical
Snip a few cable ties and the whole boot loom can be removed for easy work on a table.
The complete loom as I’d modded it for the first camera.
I wanted to use as much untouched original Mazda wiring as possible. This is easy, but only if the two contacts are removed from the number-plate light plug to allow those two wires to be extracted from the old umbilical, after I had first drawn out the cut-off camera power wires. I put some tape around the contacts to prevent the tangs snagging on the corrugations and staggered them by a couple of inches to minimise the cross-section, both when removing and when reinserting them as first-in later.
Extracting the contacts is tricky because a slim jewellers screwdriver is needed into the front of the plug to lever/lift the latch out of the recess in the contact to allow it to be extracted.
The new fatter umbilical can be fitted into the rubber end seal with the help of an insulating sleeve stretcher, at work they were always known by a rude name instead of the correct one, Hellerman Pliers, here shown with a fuse clipped between the three expanding prongs.
Then pulling the wires back through the new slightly fatter umbilical was trivial, as was the soldering and sleeving of the wires on some pre-made connectors I had in stock. This is now the complete boot loom including camera and its two controls, one a button to choose video format and one a loop to cut when happy with the format. I show the old flexi to compare, it’s only a tiny bit smaller at 5mm internal diameter.
It tested OK out of the car. Tomorrow I’ll install it.