All right, I guess that was mean. I've caused enough trouble today already.
I used five blue LED's in place of the five little light bulbs. I used
2600mcd (brightness value) led's from radio shack they were 3.99 ea. If you
hunt around you'll probably find them cheaper, but keep in mind blue is much
more expensive than red, green or yellow leds. The blue light from these
LEDs is so deeply blue that it over powers the green filter on the
instrument panel and shows blue. I wish I had a camera to show you, but I
don't.
First get the instrument panel out. 1.) pull plastic dash outer piece off,
2.) unscrew 5 or 6 screws holding instrument panel in , 3.) Tilt steering
wheel down, move gear shift down to 1st or 2nd and pull firmly on instrument
panel. 4.) instrument panel off. on back side unscrew card board piece in
about 5 or 6 places then you have access to the electronics board. Try not
to mess anything up here. Notice the bulbs have labels on the circuit
board, your looking for 5 of them that say "ILL".
The led turns on with 3.7 to 4.5V and draws 20mA, so I soldered a 390 ohm
resister in series to get the voltage across the led where I wanted it (12V
- .02A*390ohms = 4.2V). When I got all the LED's in place two of them where
intermittent from bad contact. So I wired all five LED-resister combo's in
parallel with each other with insulated copper strands in a complete circle.
This makes the power source five times redundant so none of them flicker,
and the current is so low that even if all five LEDs were running off one
light socket it would draw less current than one bulb. A little hint. In
each bulb socket the return side (neg polarity) is on the bottom. You can
verify this with a multimeter's continuity function between the contact and
a ground point.
If you know a little about electronics this should make sense. If you don't
then I can explain a little off line (or on off-topic list) but it really is
basic.
The dimmer doesn't seem to work very well on the instruments now, but that's
okay with me. For brightness, at full dimmer power the leds look like the
bulbs did on about half dimmer power.
Hope all that helps
Jay W
4.7L Auto Sport+ C.C. 2wd Black
Mods Profile page at
http://www.twistedbits.net/WWWProfile/dakota/Re5X8z5la@Ix2/profile.htm
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Woodruff, Jason P
> Sent: Monday, September 24, 2001 2:11 PM
> To: DML (E-mail)
> Subject: Re: DML: Dash lights (HOW!!!)
>
> How much money you got, and I'll consider telling you.
>
> Jay W
> 4.7L Auto Sport+ C.C. 2wd Black
> Mods Profile page at
> http://www.twistedbits.net/WWWProfile/dakota/Re5X8z5la@Ix2/profile.htm
>
> >Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2001 01:45:50 EDT
> >From: Puddlestompa@aol.com
> >Subject: Re: DML: Dash lights (HOW!!!)
> >
> >How did you do it
> >
> >Aaron
> >Vancouver, Wa
> >98 2WD 2.5L 4cyl RC
> >http://www.hometown.aol.com/puddlestompa/mydak.html
>
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