Figured I'd go ahead and share some of the photos from my weekend project-a dash gauges LED conversion to amber lighting. Maybe this will help someone in the future with a project, I don't know.

instead of straight soldering individual LEDs to the board, just soldered one strip of LEDs and wrapped it around all the gauges. It was a lot easier to deal with that way. The only bulbs that we soldered were the turn signals and brights indicator.

 

Are they bright enough and do you have any night pictures?

 

I'm also interested in night pictures. Seems as if this would be an easy way to light up the speedo and HVAC. My speedo is already soldered btu the HVAC could be something to tinker with.

 

the HVAC is DEFINITELY bright enough. I'm honestly wondering if I might need to do something to tone it down a bit. But I did the HVAC in cool white, which might make a difference.

The gauges aren't as bright as stock, but honestly I'm ok with that. I'm thinking of putting a surface-mounted LED on each of the needle motors, underneath the needles, to illuminate them a little better. You get a lot of light towards the outside of the gauge, near the numbers, but towards the middle it dims a bit. KPH would be a bit hard to read, or instance.

I'll take some night pics and post shortly.

 

I assume they're not connected and able to be dimmed, right?

 

Ok, here are some pics I just took of it in the dark:



and the HVAC unit (I left the floor lights on for comparison. It's bright):



and, I also forgot to mention, also added an LED strip to a pressure switch on the glovebox, which I find quite useful:



Took a quick video so you could see it that way, too. The gauges look kinda dim in the video, not sure why, but that first photo seems to show them much more accurately:

 

Love the hvac. I'm def going to do that.

 

I am going to do my havc switches like that. When you do it, what do you do with the existing bulbs that are in there?

 

The existing bulbs come out aisle enough with pliers. Just be really careful not to damage the board it is quite fragile.

One other thing you have to do with the hvac is cut a groove out for the lights to wrap all the way around. There are little walls that block off the temp controls from the rest of the unit and you have to carve them out a bit to let the strip through. Pic #4 shows this if you look in the top middle. Be very careful and go slow on this-it's very easy to break the plastic.

Also, it's not just the strip, there are two flat LEDs under the temp controls as well. They're really easy to do just wanted to point them out because they help.

Lastly, for anyone doing this, the gray wire is the positive and the black is negative. We found this out by lots of trial and error, thought I'd save you the hassle.

 

Also, red monte- missed your question about dimming. Yea we wired them into the hvac light power (see previous post about wires to use) so they work like the original lights and dim with the rest of the interior.