LED dash lights

[halistan]

So, i did a thing this weekend. After i had AWD tuning replace my dash with the one that I bought from Ben I noticed that several of the lights in the dash were not working and the odometer also was broken.

Kuo and I decided to take the gauge cluster out again and tinker with it. Since the lights were out, I thought i had a good idea and decided to replace the lights with LEDs (last forever and should be brighter, right?) but the SVX isn't that easy, come to find out.

I replaced the main lights with Blue LEDs and those work well enough, but about half the warning lights had issues. They would come on (and were super bright) and when I began to drive the lights would not ever shut off. I drove about 3 miles and none of the lights ever went out (STOP, BRAKE, ABS, etc, all stayed on).

I ended up replacing those 5-6 that wouldn't go out with the regular bulbs again until I come up with another solution and the other lights that were too bright i ended up painting over 2 of the 3 light emitters to dim them down some and now they are about perfect.

The main lights that are blue have an interesting affect on the dash. It looks good with the numbers all in blue, but it doesn't light up the needles very well. Last night when I drove around there was so little light in the needle that i could barely tell what the tach, speed, fuel and temp gauges were.

Kuo had an idea were we replace the 2 top lights with little LED blacklights and paint a little bit of white or glow in the dark paint on to the needles to make them glow better at night. I found a place that sells those and have ordered some and will see how it works out.

https://www.superbrightleds.com/more...-car/226/1061/

I took pictures but they came out so badly that i ended up deleting them. I'll take more tonight and show the progress if anyone is interested. It wasn't nearly as difficult as I thought it would be but you do have to be quite careful. The plastic is very brittle and prone to breaking. However, between the 2 consoles i have, i managed to make one really good one.

As for the Odometer, I found that the plastic rod that you push to reset the trip had broken at some point. Fortunately, the other one i had was not broken and was able to fix that so my odometer works again too, WOO HOO!