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Cheap way to light up your gauges.


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XhaloZ
01-21-2006, 11:48 PM
Hey I got bored and figured this out I went to superbrightleds.com and I bought 5 LEDS. Payed like 15 bucks with shipping. The brightness was 2500MCD and the angle that the light spread out of the LED was 45 degrees. Cool thing is you don't have to paint anything.. and LEDs don't burn out. You can buy any color you want and they are really cheap at that website. Well I went to Radio Shack and bought a resistor (99 cents) to change the voltage from the car (12V) to one that the led can handle (4V) and I took off all the old bulbs and connectors and threw them in the trash. Next I found out what copper wire was the positive and which was the negative. I clipped the LED leads real short and soldered them on the copper contacts where the bulbs used to fit in. Remember if you reverse the polarity on an LED it will burn out. You can tell which lead is positive because the positive lead is longer then the negative one. I also didn't put them that far inside the hole because I bought 45 degree LEDs and they disperse light at a greater distance when you pull them farther from your objective. (Your gauges.) I taped the resistor on the top of the cluster and then screwed my cluster in and it worked beautifully. Now there is alot of stuff I didn't cover so if you plan on doing this just email me with any questions. xhalos@hotmail.com. Oh here is some pictures... they are crappy and dark because I took them with my cellphonehttp://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1074/2156/1600/DSC_00019.jpghttp://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1074/2156/1600/DSC_00020.jpghttp://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1074/2156/1600/DSC_00021.jpg

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