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My Cheapo Gauges Improvement Mod

This is something I haven't seen on here yet and so far no-one except Janinja seems to have done anything all that adventurous with the stock gauges except completely replacing the whole unit. I've replaced the bulbs inside with loads of blue LED clusters from eBay. I bought 6 blue wide angle 8-LED clusters from the nice people at Sure-Electronics on ebay for approx $9 with a nice bulk postage discount. I got these ages ago but have only just have time to fit them. The delivery took a little while but the company was very good. They even sent me 2 spares after I showed them pictures of 2 larger ones not working (one set I blew up by stupidly joining the cables at one end).

There is another alternative that several other people have tried out after seeing my mod. It's easier, quicker, less bright and less fun than mine though! :) You can just buy LED replacement bulbs for the gauges and that requires no soldering or taking the whole thing to bits. I prefer my way though! :) This is described here by Superjuvento and he just replaced the normal bulbs with blue LED replacements.

What I did to power these lights is I pulled all of the original bulbs out of their holders and chopped the end off one of the holders and connected all my LEDs to the two exposed ends of wire that produced (don't join both ends of the circuit you make or it will blow!

LEDs1

LEDs1

There were several things I wanted to do:-

I've definitely know I've done the first two and seeing as it now draws 6 watts instead of 15 watts I think I've probably done the first.


Anyhoo, this is what I did: Firstly, you have to get the instrument cluster off. That's three Phillips screws to get the plastic over off and then 2 bolts to remove the whole thing. Be careful now, unscrew the connection to the speedo and undo the two wire connections to the gauges. Now you can lift them out and turn them over:-

You have three nuts to remove to get the bracket off and 5 Phillips screws to take the whole back off:-
LEDs1

Then you can flip it over and take the window thingys off. There are three bulbs, two of which are covered by metal tabs that are quite easy to pull off with a bit of twisting. There is also a plastic surround on the middle bulb that I snapped off after removing the speedo mechanicals:-
bracket

This would also be a good time to reduce your mileage (JOKE). I then removed the clusters from the metal bases they came on (had to use a Phillips screwdriver for the screws and a Flathead to prize it them off the sticky stuff). I then placed my clusters all around the gauges wherever there was space for them (I had to chop a couple of bits of plastic off here and there and temporarily moved the speedo mechanicals to get one underneath on the left:-
opened

Then it was a job of chopping off the wires and soldering them together (make sure the soldered ends are insulated here with heatshrink or similar):-
planning

I pushed all of the bulb holders out, removed the bulbs and chopped the cables leading to one of them (it can be reattached if you change your mind anyway). I wired this into the LED clusters and you can see what it looks like below (remember to insulate any exposed ends):-
soldered

And here is the final result in the dark (it looks fricking sweet!!!):-
lit up

It also looks good in the day but not as bright all over:-
finished at night

The clusters are currently only stuck on with sticky pads but later on I'm probably going to seal the holes with plastic cold-weld and also use that to glue them in permanently - although the sticky pads have held on very well 6 months down the line!

 

 

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