Instrument Cluster Gauge Swap How-To (with some other stuff)

[lwarrior1016]

Fantastic! The biggest issue I had in my brain was how to hold the lights in the bezel. You answered everything very clearly and Im on the right page now. I really appreciate the time you took to write all that info out. Im going to stick with stock-ish colors as well.


One last thing (which may be a shot in the dark), I am keeping my air bag system and it requires a bulb for the light or it wont work. Do you know if that circuit is a resistance based circuit or if the light just completes the circuit? What I mean is if I put an led in line will it work correctly or is it like turn signals where the led has less resistance and they start to flash faster without an in line resistor? Is the question clear enough? (It makes sense in my brain lol)

 

[mcglsr2]

Fantastic! The biggest issue I had in my brain was how to hold the lights in the bezel. You answered everything very clearly and Im on the right page now. I really appreciate the time you took to write all that info out. Im going to stick with stock-ish colors as well.


One last thing (which may be a shot in the dark), I am keeping my air bag system and it requires a bulb for the light or it wont work. Do you know if that circuit is a resistance based circuit or if the light just completes the circuit? What I mean is if I put an led in line will it work correctly or is it like turn signals where the led has less resistance and they start to flash faster without an in line resistor? Is the question clear enough? (It makes sense in my brain lol)

Sure thing! And yup, I know exactly what you are asking - and unfortunately I'm not sure of the answer. I ended up using a bulb - in this pic here, it's the green one on the bottom right of the bulb cluster area:

I opted not to switch over to an LED because I wasn't sure if the internal resistance would cause an issue. The airbag stuff has logic in it such that if the bulb is burned out, it will chime instead of light the bulb. I didn't feel like risking it. If you want to use a 12 volt LED, I honestly feel like you would be okay - but set it up such that you can test it and swap it easily. You can also get a normal 12v bulb, measure the resistance across it, and then measure the resistance across the 12v LED - if they are the same or pretty close, you are probably fine. If they are way off, you will either have to use a bulb or add resistors to the LED to get it up to the bulb (which will affect light output of the LED somewhat, but probably not drastically - I wouldn't expect the resistance to be that far off).

If you do opt to use an LED, let us know how it works out


In my case, I need to rip the air bug stuff out anyway, as I no longer have them.

 

[jjltthomas]

I’ve got one of the old Speedware White Gauge cover kits. The numbers are in blue which kills me because everything else is green. My question is if I get yellow LEDs for my cluster, will the numbers turn green? Don’t think I’m stupid it’s just as a kid we are taught yellow and blue make green, I just wasn’t sure it would work out this way yellow LED’s.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[jerry51]

What you need is the sensor and the connection light