01tibby

thank god. also made my heater illum. brighter, and swapped some blue leds in the a/c and recirc. switches. the other switches are much harder to make blue...i still haven figured out how.

that little blue circle is there just cause i forgot to cover up the extra hole for abs in the gauge faces with a peice of the old gauges.

heres what they would look like during the day.


at night


illuminations. you can tell they are bright, because if you look at my cd player, you can actually read the figures on it. the exposure time was set quick for these pictures.

majik

amazing! looks sooo freakin' nice. I'd like to see inside the gauge cluster though, with the gauges off lol.gif but I'm sure you don't want to be pulling the dash off anytime soon. Looks VERY nice... but where did you get the tiny bulbs for the battery light, door ajar, etc.??

01tibby

guess ill do a little mock up DIY on what i did.

that is actually a first gen cluster in my 2ng gen, beacuse the pathways for the warning light bulbs didnt line up correctly for the gauges i had in the 2nd gen cluster. they are not perfect in the 1st gen cluster either, but they are REALLY close. anyway, this is what i did.

wipe the back of the little windows with OOPS!!! on a quitip. this clears them up. get these from here. http://www.superbrightleds.com/cgi-bin/sto...3.24346&next=50

to do the needles, pick at the little studs that hold the needles together, wipe the stock paint of with some more OOPS, then paint it with a metallic paint marker or somthing similiar. use plenty of coats.

here comes the hard part.... the toughest part about lighting up the needles with blue leds is that there isnt enough room to stick a whole bunch of leds and resitors behind those little arms that direct light to the needles. so i cut them down. make sure you cut them down at the same angle they were before. i used the weller portasol soldering tool for this job...plus its a great tool to have. used the hot knife attachment to cut through the plastic like butter, then i used the hot-blower attachment to make the cut very glassy so light could pass through it easily. then just make little clusters of leds(with 470ohm resistors of course) behind the now spaced out area. i used 3mm leds. clusters of 3 for the big "light receptacle things" and then smaller clusters of 2 or just one for the other ones. turns out that you can actually light up the stock faces pretty well too with these leds. you have to find out which little circuits are the + for illumination and the -. there are actually labels on them in some places, and then you only need to follow it to the bulb housing to determine which side is + and which is -. you need to knwo this because leds have to be a certain way to work.

since the warning lights werent exact for the 1st gen cluster, i cut little circles around them and taped them to the back of my new gauges. it would be much harder on a 2nd gen cluster. you would actually have to cut the light pathways out that direct the warning lights, and then reroute them with foil or somthing.

sorry if i rambled. im pretty tired though with all this typing. feel free to post questions and ill answer them tomorrow when i have a clear mind. LOL

oh yeah, maybe when i get some time, ill let people send me there gauge clusters and i can do this for them. only 1st gen ones though, because the 2nd gens would be way to hard(check on ebay for 1st gen clusters 2nd geners, they are completely backwards compatible with all the indicators i tested atleast).

bed now.

damnit, triple edit. also forgot to say that my dash is painted real glossy, so thats why its kinda glarey.

nexuz

mmmm .. Blue LED goodness.. Looks really cool, but you lost me after " whole bunch of leds and resitors behind those little arms that direct light to the needles" lol.. I guess I will have to re-read it, when I am awake.. and sober..

Sending you our Gauge Cluster would probably be a better idea for me, as when winter come my tib is going to sleep.. so I won't be needing the clusters for a while.. (right now, kind of hard to drive without them.. ) I am sure, it would look different on a gauge, that is stock, I am in the process of making a vinyl cover for it, in Tib Silver(with all the numbers cut out of it).

but looks really nice..

tibwrcsbj

tibby, are the 74 leds what go into the heater/blower controls too??? i'd want to do them in red and somehow figure out a way to also have the blue part light up, any ideas for that???

01tibby

well, i just used some of the millions of leds i bought for those. i chipped the top of the led down so that it dispersed light at a wider angle, then i just drilled holes into the white backing and superglued leds in wherever i could. then i ran one wire for power and one wire for ground to all of the leds, and connected that to the old power and ground wire for the bulb that used to be in there.

im not sure, but i think that sticking a red led near the parts where you want red to be, and a blue led near the blue part would work, since the covers would only pass light that is the same color as they are.

majik

how did you "clip" the top of the LED? Isn't it plastic? What tool did you use, I figured it would shatter the entire thing

how would I wire up some LED's so that they would have more light shining through the back of the gauges? like the Tach.. I could put LED's where I want them, but what would I wire it to?

canadianshark74

those guages look awesome, nice job

01tibby

i wired the leds into the stock bulb holder thingies. it takes a steady hand to solder them in there without getting the sides to touch, but it isnt to hard. just get a little solder on your tip, hold it on the little copper part that makes contact with the circuit sheet thing, and then push solder onto the wire from the opposite side once the thing gets hot enough. i really recommend having a lot of soldering experience before trying this though.

to "clip" the top, i just got one of my knives, slid it about 1-2mm from where the metal peices inside the acrylic housing would get hit, then i just tapped on the top of the knife till it cut right through, sending the other end led flying off somewhere. it wont shatter as long as you have a sharp enough knife and use light taps.

REDZMAN

All sounds and looks great, but without pictures or diagrams, folks won't understand.