Thread: LED Dash light replacement - Anyone done this

Mick

Did this a while ago on my Defender. One of the best improvements I've ever made (other than tweaking the boost & fueling), and one of the most straightforward. I bought a kit of replacement LEDs from a fellow forumer off the old LRE forum. The replacement globes were blue LED clusters already mounted up so they simply pushed in to the existing globe holders. Couldn't have been easier.




I bought extras for the new boost, egt & tacho as well:



All very bling I know, but they are effective.

Paid for them via paypal, and received them in the post from the UK in less than a week.

Paul [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin.gif[/img]

mate they are flash, i like them, id have to figure out how to mount them in the disco dash, with the printed pc back panel.

Mick

Hi landrovermick, I could probably give you some ideas if anyone wanted to do something alone those lines.

If you are interested, the first thing is unlike the other pics, don’t use standard LEDs, they have a viewing angle of about 12 to 20 degrees which means that if you are not almost directly in centre of the panel, the light diminishes rapidly the as you move away from the centre.

The trick is to use SMD ( Surface Mount Device ) LEDs, these are smaller, about twice the price of standard LEDs and are can be much harder to work with. The up side is that they commonly have a viewing angle of around 120 degrees which means you can see the light at an equal intensity no matter where you are.

Also, using a simple graphics program and some transparent printing material, you can come up with any form of finish you want, starting with the ubiquitous timber finish to something that looks like it escaped from the control panel of Star Trek Enterprise.

Let me know if you want to go further but I would not be able to do a full blown project for a while as I have so many orders to fill over the next few months that I am now working 7 days a week to try and keep up.

Cheers.

Drive safe thats a great idea, I like the idea of the surface mounted leds,

ill work at getting a second dash panel and ill look at doing something for the site, that is when i do the re trim on the disco seat in the garage......


Mick

Mick

The fella I bought mine from does kits for Discos as well. He is simonb on the www.landroveraddict.com forum. You can have the LEDs in just about any colour as well, simple plug and play stuff as easy as replacing the globes. He also does a simple plug in wiper delay for the Defender rear wiper.

If you want his direct email contact details, send me a pm.


Paul [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin.gif[/img]

I coloured the bulbs in my County with bulb dye.

I bought two small bottles in about 1967 - one amber, one green. I'm still using them. They look like bottles of nail polish - and probably are.

There's enough in each bottle to last, well, 40 years [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif[/img]

Ron