SRS Airbag B1836 Code

If you just leave it and leave the code I'm not sure what will happen in the event of an accident probably the airbags will deploy and then of course is a bigger mess so I guess you could probably ride around with it I'm done I've had my airbag off my steering wheel hub for a long time while I'm painting the button wings and that sort of nonsense The SRS light is on but who cares I don't generally set the airbags off so I don't know if they'll work if I'm in an accident and I really don't care personally.

 

I would suggest you repair the wires since you know where they are.
And with that code, the air bags may not work...

 

Just cut it open, and splice in new sections...

 

Well that's a relatively fat looking harness from here I have to go out and look at a car that I have here but it would seem to me it wouldn't be but a few wires that are compromised so each wire making two pieces that need to be put together I can't imagine more than three or four of them being sliced diced broken what have you I mean what is somebody take a sawzall to the thing you did that with a drill bit so it should be relatively quickly to squeeze connect that mess together pretty quickly that'll hold up for quite a while use some silicone grease and what have you after you get them all together and wrap it up and leave it alone I should be okay I can't see it as well from here I blew it up a little bit it doesn't look like you need to replace the whole harness that doesn't look like that's going to be a plug-in at each end maybe a little more involved than that

 

I guess that's a drill or twist drill damage I don't know if I'd have to pull the whole headliner down but it have to be peeled back and held with something while I access that part of the loom and get it to hang down or do something while I pull the tape back and have a look in there I don't know how many wires or how thick that is I'd have to go out to a car and literally pull it down and look which I can do in this 05 that I have sitting which is almost completely apart almost just a shell I don't know how many wires in there need to be reconnected 5 7 9 etc once you have a wire count you can buy plugs for a certain wire counts or what have you and crimp in the plugins and pieces snap the connectors into the plastic kind of like amp connectors if you will and then plug it together put a piece of tape over it stuff it back up in the headliner and forget about it for the amount of wires noted above this would be better than a bunch of red squeeze connectors unless you stagger them all which is kind of a pain

 

Is there a pluggable connector between that harness and the airbag? (It will be bright yellow, and probably have a weird locking mechanism on it.) Or is that a pigtail harness of the airbag?

If it's part of the side curtain airbag proper, then, well ... Bob Wilson often comments that you get to pick two out of three: (good, fast, cheap). The good and fast fix would be to change the airbag.

If you get into splicing it, there can be adequate ways of splicing airbag circuits. @Elektroingenieur once posted this video of Toyota technician training for making a splice in an airbag circuit. (If you back the video up, you see more about that.)

But—this is important—all such examples are of splicing airbag circuits in the car wiring, with the airbag unplugged. They do not show anybody attempting to test or splice wires attached to an airbag.

The special, pluggable, bright yellow airbag connectors are built with shorting mechanisms inside so that whenever you unplug one, it puts a short circuit across the airbag squib to protect it against any stray currents that could set it off. If you have an open circuit in a pigtail of the airbag, you don't have that protection as you work on those wires. (Also, if you do the splice with a generic multipin connector, as Tom suggests, lacking the shorting mechanism of an airbag connector, you've made a connection somebody else might undo later that would leave the airbag without a protective short across it.)

Also, if you splice wires attached to an airbag, the next question is how you test your work. Under no circumstances think of using an ordinary ohmmeter to test wiring attached to an airbag. (!)

There are ohmmeters made for explosive/squib testing safely, but most folks won't have one. A great stocking-stuffer for the aspiring bomb technician in your life though.

Those concerns apply if that wiring really is a pigtail attached to the airbag. If it only looks like that in the photo and it really just is part of the car passing behind the airbag and you can properly unplug the airbag from it, then by all means, unplug the airbag and then splice away.

 

That's what I'm looking for the yellow connectors with the spring clip to unload it and all that I don't see that so we must be down line from that so here at my place I would just take the battery power away from the car splice the wires individually or into a plug if it's downstream from the ABS plug the yellow one then all the safety business in that plug is going to stay working and down line of anything else that's happened I would think just makes reasonable sense so the yellow plug is going to stay kind of a pain to replace that I guess you could cut one from a car and cut back from the wires then turn the power off in your car that you're working on and spliced that plug in with regular squeeze slices and tape plug it up liven up the car and be good. I've only heard stories about these things going off I'm not even sure I've seen a YouTube video this was way back before YouTube was even invented I worked in salvage yards for years and let me tell you we've tried to set them off with antics and stupidity I don't think I've ever seen one blow up I seen the cars come in with them activated obviously but we've never but we didn't try 12 volts of power right to the pins We were always throwing them shooting at them you know whatever setting them on fire that kind of thing No one wants to stand there holding two pins of electricity right in front of the airbag seems kind of pointless obvious that'll set it off I'm talking about mistakes.

 

Probably all of us, including me, have our share of hold-my-beer things we have done and gotten away with even though we knew better (or would have known better, if we'd known what we should have known).

What sets Tom apart is how important it seems to be to him to recruit other people into doing the same stuff because he got away with it.

 

No I don't want anybody to do anything except fix their car doesn't seem to me here that we're going to be exploding anything I don't think any yellow plugs are here they're that way or left or what have you this looks like somebody poked a hole in a wiring harness with a drill bit or a punch or something and that should be pretty easily straightened out I think the plugs for the ABS are all intact and looking wonderful We can't even see them anywhere in these pictures but just a picture of the sheet metal and the trim and the hole and the wiring harness tells me the cars and relatively good shape and the airbags haven't gone off yet so I guess that's a plus or the one curtain hasn't gone off or whatever this is all about whichever one.

 

Exactly so if you were to cut out the plug from another car measure how far you need to have wired to plug it in and have some splice wire all of the yellow plugs safety features will be intact when it's all spliced in wire for wire everything should be like it should be so your splices could be right where they are and then they go to the back of the car probably not SRS related and the SRS related only connection you're dealing with I guess is one to the front curtain drops out of the plastic seal piece right there where it says SRS. I should have that piece right here in this other car of course mine's an '05 yours is 06 are better it may be different wire colors could change but the SRS wires wouldn't I don't believe that plug would be the same and I could cut back as far as I wanted or you could at a car and a junkyard and then just splice the other wires.

 

If it is a pigtail harness directly attached to the airbag, and the yellow connector with the shorting spring is on the end of it where the car plugs in, and the pigtail has been left open-circuited by the drill bit, the shorting spring in the connector may be ineffective as of right now. It will definitely be ineffective while you are doing the repair work. It will be ready to do its job again when you're all done splicing, if all goes well.

Tom would probably go ahead and splice on that pigtail. A tech trained by Toyota wouldn't be allowed to.

If I absolutely had to do it, I might wrap some fine wire around bare parts of both squib wires to short them (bagward of the drill bit damage), then do my splicing and testing, and once everything was spliced back up and the short spring in the yellow connector was doing its job, remove my temporary short and make sure the whole scene of the crime is covered by the insulating tape or shrink wrap.

If I had the money, I would change the airbag.

 

I've got 10 or 20 side curtain air bags sitting here in a box they're getting ready to go to the dump so if anybody needs any might be good I've never had any go off and never replaced any but I did screw up a yellow plug one time don't know anything about the grounding scheme but when it's unplugged I would assume that airbag that was plugged into that connector is now a not in lieu of going off because it's well disconnected now further down the line can something short out all the other airbags I don't know but I'm going to have the power off so once I get done cleaning up and splicing the ground and all the other wires should be working as expected I would hope If not then I'll have a car full of airbags hanging out of it and it'll be time to move on to another vehicle . Another reason to have a few

 

The shorting springs are in the airbag-side connectors. When you unplug the car wire harness from an airbag, the shorting spring in the airbag closes, to protect the airbag from any stray currents or static charges it might be exposed to as it is handled. The car connector that plugged into the bag doesn't have its own shorting spring; it's airbags that need the protection, not wires.

Conversely, if you unplug the connectors down at the airbag ECU on the floor, those connectors have shorting springs for all of the airbags, and those springs are in the harness connector, not the ECU. It isn't the ECU that needs the protection, it's the airbags, so that's why the springs are where they are. When unplugged from the ECU, all the airbags are safely shorted through the harness.

(And that's, by the way, why you unplug the airbag ECU connectors down there before doing electric welding on the car.)

 

That's pretty cool never seen that before My exhaust guy goes to welding and doing whatever without touching a thing I'm at the shop a lot and see him put you know 20-30 cars a day up in the air Prius Highlander hybrids whatever these things are all of them and go right to cutting exhaust and pieces out and welding them back in like nothing's happening oh well that's America for you. I figured if the airbag I'm working on is unplugged the yellow plug on the curtain that's right above my head and that plastic panel If I have it unplugged pretty much it's pretty safe I don't know where stray electricity is just going to fly into the plug when the yellow end spring clip is pulled up and unclipped I mean what's it going to just bounce off the body frame and jump into the connector to set the airbag just because I'm working on the car sounds great I mean I do hear what you're saying. I just can't imagine somebody and taking the console out or wherever the airbag plugs are in the particular model they're working on to unplug whatever it is a couple of plugs for the various airbags so they can change the muffler But hey sounds great. If this is the case this is why we're spending $190 an hour to work on cars makes perfect sense