camaro_five0

I put blue LED lights in my instrument cluster and recently had to remove them because my tach needle wouldn't illuminate. Also the brightness contrasted from side to side (one side of the speedo was nice and bright while the other side was dim). Does anyone have any suggestions, or has anyone done this mod themselves and had a similar problem and fixed it?

todddchi

iTrader: (3)

Swap the lights around to see if the dim area follows a given bulb. Leds are connection directional - + has to be + and neg has to be neg. Could be you hooked up a led wrong.

Also happens connections get dirty or loose, clean em up.

camaro_five0

well the LEDs are just plug-and-play. they are already 12v with the resistors built into them and they are polarized so it doesn't matter which direction you plug them in.

VIP1

Polarised means that it does matter which way you plug it in (ex: a polarised plug only fits one way). Have you tested and confirmed that all the LED units work? Also, the cluster was desigened for the spread pattern of incandescent bulbs so I am not surprised that there are some bright/dim spots with LEDs (which are much more focused and directional).

LSWon00

iTrader: (3)

+1 beat me to it

todddchi

iTrader: (3)

Just in case it isn't clear enough for you, the leds should have a little resistor which you can see if you look in from the top. That resistor should be in the same direction (could be towards up or towards down) when you lock the bulbs in the cluster.

- Make sure the bulbs are uniformly installed, and you should have either all working, or all dead.
- If only some are working, then the next candidate is a bad bulb. Swap positions and see if the dead spot follows that bulb. If it does, bad bulb. If it doesn't then maybe bad contacts.
- The contacts on the ip cluster aren't the best. Clean them up or just try seating the bulb maybe 1mm from fully seated to get into a new contact area.

It is normal for there to be some uniformity problems with leds, particularly on the 1k range of the tach. However you shouldn't have half the speedo dark. If the above items don't work, then post a pic of what it looks like and people will chime in if it's normal or not.

OneFast97Z

You should have just bought WLED-x5 LED Wedge Base Bulbs from superbrightleds.com

The size of the bulbs are 194's behind the cluster.. these leds have 5 mini leds that are projected in 5 different directions... so everything is illuminated

http://www.superbrightleds.com/mini-wedge.html

damon_Z

Do you know if the ultra-powerful WLED-W6 can work with my factory guage cluster with no side effects? I just want my guage cluster to match my white LED'ed Sport Comp II guages at night. Thanks in advance for the info.