PDP-11/45: Power Harness

Sun 17 April 2016 by Fritz Mueller

The main bit I'm missing from the '11/45 is the power distribution harness; somewhere over the years this was misplaced, or maybe I accidentally gave it away along with some excess '11/40 parts. In any case, I haven't had any luck tracking one of these down (made extra difficult by the fact that my '11/45 is an early model which requires a slightly different harness than more recent models), so I'll have to build one myself from scratch.

Luckily the required harness is pretty well documented in the engineering print sets. The crimp pins are standard Mate-n-Lok still in production. Some of the connectors are out of production, but they haven't been too hard to track down.

Here are some pictures of the amassed wire of appropriate gauges and colors, connectors, crimp pins, and the start of the harness build on the bench: