replacing lights behind guage cluster
replacing lights behind guage cluster Is there a write up for this? i cant seem to find it... i have my whole instrument cluster out of the car and not too sure on what to do... i see where the lights might be... but there are also a **** ton more. i dont know which ones to pull or even if i am to pull them or not.. i dont want to break anything
Well here's where your bulbs are (front view). Each one has a little black twist off housing that's removable from the back. Just twist them a bit and they pop right out.
It's fairly easy to tell which bulb is for what. The outer bottom two are the outside 4 gauges. The inside bottom two are the blinkers. The remaining four are for the Speedo and Tach.
No, the odometer is behind that little green circuit board. It's lit up by 3 tiny red SMD LED's. You can change the color of that too if you like, but it's not just plug and play. You have to desolder the 3 LED's that are on there and solder in 2 3mm LED's. A buddy did mine for me in blue.
The day I rolled 100k
The rest of them are just 194 LED's that plug and play. I've put them in backwards before and never blown a fuse though. They just wont' light up and you gotta pop it back out and flip it around.
The day I rolled 100k
The rest of them are just 194 LED's that plug and play. I've put them in backwards before and never blown a fuse though. They just wont' light up and you gotta pop it back out and flip it around.
Just took mine apart to convert everything to blue leds and discovered that the 98s are different than your 01 pictured above. The 98s have a hole in the circuit board for the odometer and has a clear wedge bulb mounted to the main cluster board behind it in a twist connector housing to light up the odometer. The odometer glass has a red plastic light diffuser to light the odometer red. With the diffuser removed you can clearly see the bulb lighting up behind the clear odometer glass but changing the red dufffuser to a different color would change the color of the odometer. I plan on changing mine to blue but haven't quite figured out what I will use as a diffuser (a balloon looks to have the same transparency characteristics but haven't picked up a blue one yet to test it out). Here are some pics to help explain (blurry camera):
Last edited by nightmarechevy; Sep 17, 2009 at 10:56 PM.
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All of the ABS, trac control, SES, etc are leds soldered onto the board. You can either put tape between the gauge overlay and cluster to get rid of the light or desolder it from the board. I'm sure the legs are long enough to cut with a pair of dikes if you don't have access to a solder iron.
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You can find them at superbrightleds.com or you can find them on ebay cheaper sometimes. Sizes for the different applications in your car can be found here:
Bulb to LED List. I would recommend getting the 360 degree surface mount leds as suggested. I tried some regular blue 194 leds in mine and they didn't disperse the light across the gauges at all but used the 3 smt led #74 bulbs in my a/c panel and they look amazing with NO hotspots.
Bulb to LED List. I would recommend getting the 360 degree surface mount leds as suggested. I tried some regular blue 194 leds in mine and they didn't disperse the light across the gauges at all but used the 3 smt led #74 bulbs in my a/c panel and they look amazing with NO hotspots.
