t1tec

When I turn on my lights the gauges are really hard to see. Whilst changing my gauges today I think I found the culprit (see pic).

Does anyone know of a self fix for this problem?

SoCal Driver

Several fixes. One uses led's mounted where the ends of the light pipes are, shielded from the driver. Others have used silver paint. Then there is the shinny aluminum "tape" used in air conditioning applications. Also seen aluminum foil laminated to them.

I would think that anything is better than what you have shown! I like the idea of the led's. They can not be dimmed though. Guess you could use "regular" resistance bulbs in place of the leds. The silver paint is the easiest.

You can kick up the wattage of the stock bulbs by one or two but any more will melt the instrument housing.

MacWolffe

i heard that you could clean the reflectors and put aluminum foil around them
i think clark's garage has the process.

theedge

If you really want two degress of brightness for your LEDs, rig up 2 sets of them, one ultrabright, one regular and a swtich to turn them on/off.

Zero10

I make LED's that plug right into the existing bulb holders. I have a blue set that is extremely bright, but white's, red's, amber's etc are also quite bright. I would advice you resurface the reflector, I used aluminum foil and scotch tape (just aroudn the edges) and it was 10x brighter than how mine was (but mine was soooooo bad in the first place). If you are interested in the LED's feel free to ask for pics, but I have some posted on clark's garage already if you want to take a look.
If you just want them brighter, I would advise you resurface the reflector and leave it at that. But if you want colors, go to LED's. I found that with a proper reflector, the bulbs (2w factory) were plenty bright.

t1tec

Thanks for your suggestions. I'll try and resurface them.
I'll check out your pics Zero10.

Randy_J

Post a few pics! Price?

Zero10

Sorry, I neglected to mention a price. My original asking was $40 US, but for rennlist members I can knock $5 off the price (sorry it's not alot, but these things took a long time to get right). I hope I post these properly, I have never inserted an image on this board.

Here are the amber lights. NOTE: they appear very red. This is a problem with my digital camera. I have tried a second one, and it appears to be a common flaw. If you take a picture of an amber light in a low light setting, it will come out red. The actual color of these is an orange-amber, and they are very similar to the rest of the dash lights, just not as pink.

Here are the blue's, they are the brightest (appear so, more on that later), and my favorite, but I will part with them, so they are for sale.

Here are the red ones. They are actually pretty similar to the color in the picture. The camera did give accurate red reproduction.

And finally, the white's. I am not certain how much whiter these are than the factory bulbs (it's been a while since I had mine in), but I believe they definately are a whiter color.

Now, after all that is said. I apologize for the quality of my pictures. It would appear my camera needs AA, because it has double vision. j/k, the problem is actually in the light sensor in the camera, in a low light setting, even when it is held perfectly still, there is a tiny reflection off the inside of the lens, causing this double vision problem.

Zero10

Gee, don't I look stupid. I said the amber's look red and they don't *smack* sorry, what happened is they DID look red, until I found the manual color balancing on the camera, and changed it until they matched the color of the lights. (I did it with the camera right beside the lights, so it is accurate)

Zero10

Hmm, I just don't quit posting do I? I forgot to add that in the picture of the blue. Notice all the orange areas appear very bright? That doesn't seem quite right does it. They should appear black, orange will not reflect blue light. However, this is because I shopped around for LED's a little while first. I had heard that some will emit UV light as well, and sure enough, I found some. The orange areas actually glow, as if under black light, at a very comparable brightness to the blue lit numbers. It works quite nicely I thought.
I forgot to add, I mentioned earlier I would explain about why the blue's appeared brighter. This relates to something called bluemens. The color blue registers at a higher intensity in the human eye than even white. This is because of the phosporous (sp?) on the inside of our eyes, it is very sensitive to blue light, and it is slightly overpowering sometimes, causing blue to appear brighter. I assure you that the rated output (mcd) on the white's is actually 300mcd/led (6 led's) higher than the blues. Yet the blue's will appear brighter.

turbo944

Blue being brighter or not, I really like the way the white looks best in those pics and although red is better for maintaining night vision, the big problem there is that you cannot get good night vision while using your headlights anyway.....

$35 sounds pretty good for them.....I may be tearing my dash apart to clean all of the connections in there anyway soon....would be a cool project.

SoCal Driver

"the big problem there is that you cannot get good night vision while using your headlights anyway....."

You could if they were red!

Zero10

Okie dokie. Let me try to get some pictures of the LED's with some other controlled light in the picture, try to show you how bright they are. I can say for certain they ARE brighter than the factory 2W bulbs, but that is all I have ever had, so I cannot say any more. If you have upgraded bulbs, I cannot guarantee that they will be any brighter, but they will be whiter =)

Randy_J

Zero10 - how many bulbs do you get for $35?? do they fit into the OEM bulb holders and do you need to replace the silver/foil reflectors?

I'm interested in Blue or White - can send you PayPal $$

peanut

thanks t1tec
I posted on here a while back about exactly the same problem.Looks like you've found the cause sure enough, I thought it might be the dimmer going high resistance with dirty contacts.
How difficult was it to remove the guages ? if its not too hard I might try this w/e