5000MCD LED's, Hard to Install? Options

[celiracer]

Hi guys. Well i'm wanting to make my guage cluster all red but leave the needles white. And i will be getting a boost, oil pressure, and a EGT guage for my a-piller. I have a few questions to be answered.
1. Should i get black faced guages? Or white faced?
2. Does anyone know if i painted the numbers and everything red with a type of paint and got bright white bulbs would that work?
And 3. with the guages in the pillar how could i match them with my guage cluster if every guage that i find has orange needles?

Also wanting to redo my climate control, and all my little bulbs to red. How hard are they to install? I can't get into the how-to.

This post has been edited by celiracer: Oct 9, 2006 - 12:49 PM

[Zimluura]

you can, but you doo need to have a resistor in there as well.

there are led fabrications you can get at:
http://superlumination.com/194.htm

and those have a resistor already attached and are a (somewhat) complex machine soldered circuit. they pop right in (no soldering) and all is good. if they were leds to begin with then yes, you desolder the old ones, solder in the new ones and you're done.


the reason you need a resistor (for replacing incandescent bulbs) is this:
incandescent bulbs have lots of electrical resistance just from their design. leds have very very little resistance. so hooking an led up to a battery is almost like just hooking a wire from one terminal of the battery to the other. the battery rapidly discharges all of it's current and you're left with a dead battery and a somewhat heated wire.

tangent story, when i was doing my cc unit, we used a multimeter to check the voltages and figure out +/-. my friend didn't brace himself so well, slipped, and bridged the terminals on the socket with the multimeter. and it took no time at all for one of the traces on the cc-unit board to burn. we fixed it, by finding the burnt spot (was easy to see) and running a wire around it jumping the burnt spot.

in my understanding, fuses work on the same sorta principle (it'd be nice if a fuse saved me there). fuses have very little electrical resistance and are part of the circuit, but they're designed to burn when they get too hot. so they can martyr themselves to protect more expensive things from being electrocuted. i'm going to drink one tonight "to all the heroic fuses!"

i think the biggest problem with custom wiring anything in your gauge cluster is going to be the flimsy circuit-board.

This post has been edited by Zimluura: Oct 17, 2006 - 1:16 PM