Thread: P38 LED dash mod

Good job! I'd like to understand how you changed the colour of the gauge needles? did you need to paint them separately ...do they look "blue" in daylight?

Hi,

Sorry - I forgot to hit 'subscribe' to the thread when I posted, so didn't see that you guys had replied! Apologies!

There was a fair bit of work involved in doing the conversion - but I think it is worth it for the more modern look!

The dials themselves have wide angle LED's behind them (diffused with sandpaper) to light them evenly. You have to scrape the plastic coating off the back of them to remove the green colouring. (LR had green covers on the backlight lamps, and then green plastic coating on the back of the gauges)

This is obviously a bit hair raising, as you have to do it whilst the gauges are all in one piece, and the needles are pretty fragile (and they don't come off either - they are solidly stuck onto the metal shaft of the gauge)

The needles are lit by separate LED's - they have a plastic light pipe which goes to where the factory illumination lamps are, to then direct the light onto the base of the needle, where it then illuminates the length of the needle (like crude fibre optics!)

I cut the ends off of the light pipe, and notched them big enough to put a 3mm LED in. There are 2 LED's in both the fuel gauge and the temp gauge. The main speedo/tacho gauges are lit by 2 LED's aswell - but one from either side (each effectively lighting half of the needle's travel). I have also covered the light pipes for the needles, to prevent light spillage onto the back of the dials. I originally used black PVC insulation tape, but have since opened it back up, 'tweaked' some of the LED's and also changed the PVC tape for black heat-shrink, as I found some in my box of bits that was the right size.



The needles, in daylight, are clear like they are as standard, and are then just lit when the headlight switch is turned on (as normal) except that the standard lamps/holders are removed, and the wires from the LED's are soldered onto the pads.

I am currently working on a second one, using some SMD LED's and a couple of other options for the message centre which aren't so 'invasive' (I cut a whole load of plastic out and it's lit by 5 wide angle LED's to give even coverage).

As before - pictures say it a lot better than words, so a couple more for you..

017 Message Centre LEDs.jpg
Message centre

014 Main Dials Scraped.jpg
Green coating removed from main dials

023 Needle LED Install.jpg
LED in the light pipe for one of the smaller gauges

024 Main Needle LEDs.jpg
The main gauges with LED's installed. I also bridged the gap between the middle 2 LED's with PVC tape, as there was a bit of light spillage onto the back of the dials.

Since doing this, I have pulled the cluster back out and tweaked a few things. as mentioned above, I've removed the PVC tape and replaced with heat-shrink. I have also tidied up a whole lot of the wiring, and moved a couple of the illumination LED's about to give a more even light across the whole cluster.

I currently have a second-hand cluster which I'm also working on, to see if I can refine it even more.

Hope this is of interest!

Apologies for the small images - I have bigger versions available - but not sure how to get them to show!

Cheers,
Marty

The pics look realy good. I am planning on replacing my speedo bulbs with LEDs (green for the information panel and blue for the rest). Can you advise how many and what size bulbs you used?