Hey Ultra, glad u like em. Their the OEM guage faces, I am going for the stock look. All the light work is custom. There is about 100 leds behind the guages, some are 5mm and some are 3mm. Behind the needles themselves, I have 3 leds behind the tach, 6 behind the speedo, and 4 behind the fuel and temp.

 

to see if they are grounding out somewhere before they are supposed to.

as far as the smoking problem, did you mean you will have to hardwire it into the illumination wires because you had it connected up regularly and melted the circuit? even with 100 leds, you will be using less power than the bulbs. id think the cirucit would be fine. i would check to make sure its not a problem somewhere else.

ultra, he said that when he swapped out the led with a bulb, the airbag light worked correctly, correct casper?

oh, and it looks good man. nice work.

 

Okay, I might try removing the grounds. I will see if I can get to it this weekend.

I did pull the cluster out and the printed circuit is melted. I will try taking some readings with my multimeter. I can not see why it would work on low but melt on high (if a hot hit a ground, I think it would of affected it on low power too. Time to break out the multi-meter. I also thought that 100 led's would be less than the bulbs. If I remember correctly, each led is 35mw.
If it checks out fine, I will tap into the illumination wire considering the printed circuit is already scored. I only have 1 spare cluster and I wanna keep it as a spare smile.gif.

Okay, with the Air Bag light. When I put the LED in, it was bright when I started the car, but dimmed slightly. It was still illuminating a good amount, but I did notice it dim. When I put a regular bulb in, it worked as it is supposed to. I am going to add a bigger resistor with the LED to see if I can get it to light (even if its dimmer than the rest) and go off as normal. When I find the resistance for the Air Bag light, I will add the same resistor into the gas and check engine lights. Hopefully this will solve all my problems. smile.gif

 

its prob. just that it wasnt melting as fast on low. something is wrong. i would go over ALL solder joints, make sure everything is copesthetic.

i dont know if i would try using a resistor on the gas and aribag lights. they are not a problem on mine at all. i think its just something that you missed on yours, something touching. maybe this is why you started melting stuff too. i do get the CEL dim though, and that is the only thing i would reccomend you putting a higher resistor on.

 

Ultra said he had the same prob with the fuel and airbag. You never had any problems on a second gen?

The gas/airbag/check engine should have nothing to do with the backlights, there on different circuits on the printed board. (In theory that is lol)

I do know I got a problem with the backlighting now, so I definitally need to go over everything again (even though its gonna be a chore and a half with all those lights). I am guessing I will start with this part, since its the only one which seems to be causing a major problem (I dont wanna be known for starting fires like dweet lol).

Can you drive without the cluster? My spare one is at my sisters house (30 mins away) and I am currently at work, so I will need to use my headlights tonight. (mabe I can just pull the rheostat).

Of course problems cant arise on weekends when I have some free time smile.gif.

 

***Update***
Okay, so I found out why I had smoke commin from my cluster (or so I assume).

I took my cluster out and checked it with a multimeter. 470 ohms... Hrmm, sounds fishy... tongue.gif: I am sure most of you all know what that means. I take out each guage and find out its my speedo one. After looking for a while, there is solder splash on the back of one led, which was essentially letting the power go through to the ground (through a 470 ohm resistor). I fixed the solder joint and put it back together. I cut out all the melted circuitry and re-routed it. I didnt get to test it throughly because it was dark (didnt wanna mess with a smoking cluster if I couldnt see the smoke tongue.gif).

The odd thing was that it worked without smoking on low, but on high it started smoking. Also, I would of assumed that all that power going through 1 1/4 watt resistor would burn it out.

Also, I tried 1000 ohm resistors for the check engine, airbag, and gas light. It helped a little, but I am gonna have to try higher resistance.

 

cool. what exactly was smoking? an led?

 

Nope, the LED's were fine, it was the ground wires and a power wire on the printed circuit on the back of the cluster bigeyes2.gif . I had to solder some wire in place of the burnt sections (they looked weak).

 

Because on low,the short was not pulling enough current to ground.You probably have enough circuit resistence to 'pull' it up a bit.

 

I thought about that, the rheostat would add resistance.

*Update* even after all that, on high it smoked again (after like 15 mins. Keeping it on low and gonna run another amp test on it). I used a 9volt with my multimeter and it read that it was taking .85 amps @ 9 volts. I will test it again with my car batt and multimeter... This sucks (and I now see why I should get a fire extinguisher).