Honda Civic 2009 Hybrid - the car came from an auction and some idiot apparently decided that cutting and removing the impact harness would be a good idea... so I cannot reconnect and rebuild and get the thing fixed....

Last resource is of course, the dealer but at $1,600 I must look elsewhere before declaring defeat.

 

Ok, I went under the car (side of the car) and pulled out the splash shields to access the sensors and things didn't look so bad.

What is bad is that the wiring runs through the engine bay harness so there is no way to replace only the SRS wiring: the whole thing is a whole thing ! Aside from the costly price to buy a new harness (out of question), one would have to pretty much remove the engine to reinstall a new harness (out of question too). The factory is out of their mind when "recommending to replace the harness" (and charge half the price of the vehicle).

So I did what sensible people will do: let's repair the damn thing, no matter how much work I have to do.

The driver side seems ok so I used as reference. The connector is in place, connected to the sensor, looking good.

The sensor itself has only two wires, making it easy to reconnect. The sensor and the connector have four pins but three of them are shorted to make them redundant and minimize the chance of intermitent contact, so that makes easy.

The passenger side connector though is gone, but luckily (really?) there a 4-inch wire stub that I'll be able to reconnect the one I ordered from eBay (life saver!). The sensor was left in place.

I'll know more in about a week when the new (used) connector arrives.

 

eBay has saved me once more... $29 bucks for the used connector and 90 minutes to get the job finished.

No more SRS light on, yay !

I slipped in three pieces of heat shrink tubing on the wires, soldered them together, slid the heat shrink tube on top and all is good now.
I also put on some epoxi glue to encase the protected connections. All is good now.

A some electrical notes:

The connection is made out of just two wires even though there are four pins on the connectors.

The resistance between the pins that makes the connection is 12.4Kohm

The circuit is closed: there is no ground connection - this means that there is no difference which wire you connect.

 

Great investigative work and well done on the repair.

 

damn that sucks

 

Indeed my friend, but everything is good now. Once the connector from ebay was put back, the SRS light turned off right away. It's been almost a month, no more problems :-)