DIY - LED replacement globe for gauges

[-Richo-]

LED replacement bulb for Autometer gauges

If your unhappy with the light that came with your gauge you can build this replacement globe pretty easily with only basic soldering skills. The stock globe on my Autometer boost gauge isn’t very bright, and it’s a yellowy orange colour which doesn’t help to read it at night. Now with white LED’s it looks a lot clearer making it easier to read. You could apply the same principle to just about any globe holder, but the important thing is the resistor, without it you’ll fry the LED’s. Alternatively you can get coloured LED’s instead for some cheap bling, I tried blue but found white to be the best to read the gauge.

Parts:
2 x LED’s, 5mm, high brightness, any colour of your choice (I used white) ZD-0192
180ohm 1W resistor RR-2556
2 x red connectors PT-4522 (or similar, make sure both will slot into the Autometer bulb socket with a bit of clearance in between them.)
Spaghetti 30mm long of 4mm thickness and 15mm long of 10mm thickness
Piece of thin plastic approx 1mm thick (from a screw or nail box or plastic packet)

Tools:
Soldering iron
Solder
Small electronics pliers
Wire cutters

The parts should cost no more than $10 from Jaycar, I have provided the catalogue numbers in the parts list so you can use exactly what I did, but you can get the parts from Dick Smith or whoever you like. Should take 30mins to put together. Go through the steps before you start making it and make sure you understand everything before you begin.

An IMPORTANT thing to remember is that you want to make this as short as possible because you don’t have a great deal of room inside the gauge.

First join your LED’s anode to anode (long leg), cathode to cathode (short leg) like this. Figure 1.

Snip off the excess of the LED you wrapped around, leaving the legs on the other one. Figure 2.

[-Richo-]

Tack a bit of solder on each point where you wrapped the LED around the other, Figure 3.

Now snip off the anode leg (the longer one) right where you tacked them together with solder. Figure 4.

Snip of one side of the resistor leaving about 2mm of wire. Figure 5

[-Richo-]

Now solder the resistor to where you snipped off the leg. Figure 6.

Snip the other side of the resistor off to the same length of the other leg. Figure 7

Get your snips, pliers and the red connectors and pull off all the red insulation. You don’t need to cut it off, use the pliers to hold the connector and grip the red plastic with the cutters and you should be able to pull it off. Figure 8.

[-Richo-]

Now solder these both onto the legs of the LEDs, do the resistor leg first and solder the connector as close to the resistor as possible, then match up the connector on the other leg. It is important that the connectors are at the same length and facing the same way. Figure 9.

Now get your 2, 4mm spaghetti pieces and put them over each leg leaving about 4mm of the connectors showing and shrink them with your lighter or matches. Figure 10.

Cut the piece of plastic to size so that its flush with the end of the connectors and so that its not too wide to go into the glob holder, get the 10mm spaghetti and put it over and shrink it so it holds the plastic in place. Figure 11.

[-Richo-]

Take a close look at the LED’s, youll see inside the clear plastic there are 2 elements, the larger one is the negative so make sure when you plug it into your glob holder that this goes into the negative side of the holder. If you have a 12volt battery handy (or just pop your bonnet) test out your new LED light for your gauge, if you did everything right it should be glowing nicely. It doesn’t look pretty but it works great (your not going to see it anyway).

The reason I used 2 LED’s is because 1 alone wasn’t bright enough to clearly read the gauge in pitch black, depending on what LED’s you use you may only need 1, if you do use one LED then substitute the 180 ohm resistor with a 390 ohm.

[-Richo-]

Lastly some pics of the stock globe and the LED replacement.

[xplot]

Thats good one Drop Bear, "THUMBS UP"

Cheers

[robbie]

great stuff.

deleted useless replies - dont post them again.

[robbie]

added this to the '4x4 tech bible'.. even though its not part of general 4x4 tech, I have still cross-referenced this post.

[GUJohnno]

Any chance of having the pictures linked up Richo?

[GUJohnno]

From Richo