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I updated the fornt page with more DIY stuff and pics. Hopefully this is the last time.

EL lighting can be dimmed. My old indiglo gauges had a dimmer switch on them. But my new cable doesn't have one. You could try and find the dimmer wire and tie everything to that, but you'll want everything as bright as possible anyway.

If you go with LED for backlight, there are covers that you can buy to diffuse the light. Check out the links.

http://www.beingseen.com/cable.html

http://www.k-series.com/tech_detail...._CON_LITE_SWAP

http://www.curtek.com/product_info.p...708cf666e50130

 
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Hi Gearbox,

Did you order your EL wire from beingseen.com, or did you buy it in a store? There a couple of places around here (Toronto) that sell kits, but none that meet my needs (20' long, deep blue colour, 12V inverter). I think I may have to order it online, just wanted to know if you've have experience with them..

I thought about this quite a bit and I think I'm going to go with EL wire for the gauge back-lighting and LEDs for the needles. While I'm at it, I'm going to swap out all the current amber lighting with blue LEDs as well. I can get the LEDs here locally pretty cheap...

Thanks for all the awesome DIYs - can't wait to get going on this! I love working on my car and it's too freaking cold outside to do anything but gauge and button mods!

 
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Cool man. Yeah, working in the cold sucks. I got my EL wire locally from advance auto parts. It's made by streetglow and the color is neo-blue. I acually bought three kits of 5 feet each for a total of 15 feet. Online places may have more colors than the store.

I also just tried a new trick. For one of the kits, I ran about 12 inches of cable outside of the cluster and put it at the bottom so it shines through the plastic cover. It gives a cool glow effect that is visible when it's really dark.

 
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I was first gonna try getting EL sheets and placing them behind the gauges, sort of like indiglo gauges. But it's a bit harder to set up.

Indiglo works by exciting a phosphor compound that emits light of a given wavelength. The higher the voltage, the brighter and more true the color is. That's why they will look better when the car is on (14V) instead of off (12V). I notice mine sometimes seems greener, and sometimes more blue.

 
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Here's what I'm talking about. This is with the bezel off already. I tried to push the wire towards the back, but leave enough room to light up the plastic a bit. If you don't put it in enough, you'll see the wire, or there will be too much light.

 
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Hey Gearbox,

I took my cluster apart to do some "exploratory surgery". I came up with an idea and checked out to see if it was feasible. I think it will be, but it's pending the availability of absolutely ridiculous quantities of LED's at a cheap price. There's a local electronics components distributor that I've bought stuff off of before that sells a blue LED for $0.40CDN each, or $0.37ea if you buy 100+.

They are 3mm LEDs, with a wide viewing angle (45°). The luminosity is low, 200microcandelas, but for my "plan" it should be sufficient. What I'm basically going to do is make a panel and cover the freaking thing with LEDs and put that behind the gauge faces. This will require at least 75 of these small LEDs, possibly more.

We injection-mold automotive exterior trim at the company I work for, Decoma - division of Magna, and I can cut out a sheet of 2-3mm thick TPO that will fit nicely underneath the gauge faces. In it, I'm going to drill 75+ holes and put the LEDs in them, ligning up the LEDs with the location of every number and tick mark on my gauge faces.

As for lighting the needles, I'll use your method of blue LEDs.

This will require a ridiculous amount of work, but I'm up for it. Not for the faint of heart, but I think the results could turn out well. My only fear is that I will have to completely shave off the thick clear light guides with a dremel tool, making this change quite permanent. Since I'm placing a panel underneath my faces, the light guides would unfortunately get in the way. I won't need them anyway because I'm lighting the needles from directly underneath their centers...

Damn, I'm crazy. This will probably take several weeks. I'm going out of town for most of the week so I won't be able to start building it until next week. But I'm going to go try to secure the LEDs and resistors tomorrow.

Details, pics and possibly a DIY to follow.

 
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Here's a link to the spec sheet for LED's I'm planning on using:

http://www.fairchildsemi.com/ds/MV/MV5B60.pdf

 
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I think you should reconsider what you're doing.

When converting your luminosity into standard units, that gives 0.2 millicandelas. The ones I bought are 2,600 millicandelas! That's a huge difference, almost 1300X dimmer. They will barely light up at all.

Second, with that many LEDs, they will get dimmer as you go in series. For the big LEDs, each one has a forweard voltage of 3.4V or something. So after adding three (past the 12V on the battery), they start to decrease in brightness.

And how are you planning to hook up that many LEDs? Besides taking forever, you're gonna have to fit wires in that small cluster.

If you are set on doing leds, I would go with the original plan of doing 20 of the 5mm 2600 millicandela ones. And even that will be hard to wire up.

For the small LEDs, you have to also factor in the gauges acting as a filter. Especially if you have white numbers, the light won't be just passing through a clear layer of plastic. I just don't want you to spend 2 weeks hooking up tons of LEDS and barely be able to see them at night.

Here is another member who did their cluster shortly after mine.

http://www.7thgencivic.com/forums/sh...hreadid=137792

 
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Well, by using combinations of series and parallel wiring, you can accomplish almost anything while maintaining maximum brightness. You can put three LEDs in series and then put those in parallel with another 3 in series. This "cluster" of 6 LEDs will require a pretty hefty power resistor, more than the typical 1/4 watt ones... It all depends on the specs of your particular LED.

Well, after spending MORE time researching LEDs in general, I think I'm going to take your advice and stick to super bright (2500+ microcandela) LEDs.

What I think is a major problem with using acetone is that it removed the hatched-black regions. These are put on to compensate for varying intensities, based on the distance of a particular point to the nearest light sources. All I have to say is that the engineers that designed the stock gauges knew what they were doing! Here we are messing like crazy trying to get things even...

Well, I'm going to keep reading, researching and thinking about this until I get the guts to hack my cluster apart.

 
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Good luck with everything. The acetone is necessary to remove the colored filter, and it shouldn't matter if you even out the light with LEDs or something else.

Someone said the new 03-04 clusters that use white LEDs, only have 4 LEDs per dial. A white spreader and light shield somehow disperses the light evenly.

Of course the only way to get it even is to take it to the car and move the lights around while they're on.

 
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I was thinking for trial purposes I could rig up a 12V power supply up here in my condo. I'll use a volt-meter to determine which leads activiate the illumination, then hook it up. Would save a great deal of coming and going...

Like I said in my previous post, I wish I could get rid of the orange film, but keep the black hatching. This would result in pretty even light distribution, since it would take into account where the bulbs are relative to a particular spot on the gauge face. Since the luminous intensity is inversely proportional to the distance from the light source, you need something to attenuate the light in order to get even coverage. That is, unless you run 15' of EL cable behind the gauges. I kinda like that idea, since I KNOW it will result in even lighting. The only drawback is that the colour won't match the LED powered needles or other switch illumination.

I've seen some EL kits that are marked as being "deep blue". Maybe that would be better? Which colour/brand did you use, gearbox?

 
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On second thought, I really wish you could use an 03+ cluster in our cars. I've heard the pinouts and/or connectors themselves are different, though. And, I wouldn't even want to know what Acura would charge for a whole new cluster assembly. Ouch.

 
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Someone has successfully swapped an 03 cluster into an 01 car. It just involves getting the wire diagram and connecting wires. Not very unique imo, even though they look good.

The EL wire I got was Optix (streetglow) neo-blue. The only way to get it to match would be with the same LEDs you use for the needles.

I'm very happy with the way mine looks, especially now that the cluster has a little glow to it. Looks like stock indiglo gauges. Even with all that cable, it's still not as bright as my regular glow gauges I had. I miss not having those sometimes cause there were so nice looking.

Again remember that the brightness of light will decrease alot from behind the gauge faces. When I was testing the lights, I removed the gauge face and the wire was extremely bright. Then I put the face on and it made it alot dimmer. For some reason the needles aren't as bright as before, either. I bet all those extra LEDs and cable are eating up the juice.

I think the gauge faces were designed to work better with regular incandescent light. Here's a pic when I first cleared out the back and was using the stock bulb backlight. I almost kept it like this, but the blue LEDs were leaking over parts of the amber and it started to look nasty with that color.

 
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I got a needle question for you. When I took my cluster apart yesterday, I noticed that my needles were orange on top and white on the bottom. Is this the same as yours? The pics in your DIY look quite a bit different.

I'm still wavering between the EL-wire and the lots of LED's approach. I might buy a few of those el-cheapo 3mm blue LEDs, shave off the heads and rig them up to see how bright they are. What I like about them is that they emit light at 430nm - a very deep blue, bordering on violet... Looks kinda like the Jetta gauges (which I love).

I think the LED's with the 200uc output would be good if, as I suggested, I used a crap load of them directly behind each number - as opposed to putting them in the stock bulb locations (no way that would work).

 
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Well, I never showed a pic of the BEFORE needles. Once you take off the top layer of orange with alcohol, you'll see that the bottom layer is also orange with white underneath. So you have to take off the bottom layer as well and paint it with white transparent glass paint.

Wow, that's cool. I think my LEDs are 470nm. The EL cable does look blue. But when compared to the artificial LED blue, it looks like there's a greenish tinit to it. I know it's my eyes. And when I first start the car and turn em on, the EL wire is blue. Then after driving around, it changes to aqua-blue. It's really strange.

But yeah, I would just pick up a few of the tiny LEDs and see how bright they are behind the cluster.

 
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One problem you might have is with brightness. Even with bright blue light, it still doesn't look as luminous as say red or yellow. I bet if you use 20 big LEDs, it may give enough lighting.

 
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I'm thinking I may order my LEDs online, at superbrightleds.com. I checked around the local electronic component supply stores, cheapest I found for a 3000microcandela LED was $2.80CDN.

Like I said before, I want to use a lot of these and spread them around, directly underneath the gauge faces. By my estimate, I'll need at least 32 of them to do the gauges and needles. Superbrightleds.com has them for $0.90-$1.30US or so, I'm thinking I'd go nuts and order 50-60. I'm also planning on doing all my switches (Ventilation, heated seats, power mirror, sunroof, power window, cruise control). The resistors I can buy locally, though.

 
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I'd order from here which I did a while ago, really good service and fairly quick, cheap and the more you buy the more you get for free. Good place to deal with and ask them to send as a gift with a value of $10, save on border duties that way

 
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Sweet. Sounds good, and that site has the cheapest LED lights. You may want to try some of those LED plastic covers to diffuse the light even more.

Man I wish I researched this more. Those blue leds are twice as bright as the other ones I got.

 
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Thanks for the info, Cosmo. I'll look into them. I'm planning on ordering 60 blue LEDs (yes, 60!). I was also playing with the idea of having RED needles. I think it might look sweet with the blue blacklighting. Plus, my headunit is lit up with blue and red LEDs. Red LEDs are pretty cheap - wouldn't hurt to grab a few.

Gearbox - I was thinking of using 3mm LEDs instead of the 5mm ones to light up my smaller switches (Power mirror, sunroof etc...). Since it's so tight in there, would that be a good idea?

 
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Holy Crap. That lsdiodes.com site has some CHEAP prices! 0.45 for a hi-output blue led. Crazy.

Well, I'm placing my order today... I'll let you know on my progress.

 
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OK. I just ordered 75 blue LEDs and various resistors to wire it up. Damn, can't wait to get started. I've secured some materials from work here to help me with my project... I should be receiving these early next week, paid an extra 3 bucks for priority delivery.

Let the modding begin!!!

I highly recommend http://www.lsdiodes.com/ . Awesome prices, and their customer service is amazing.

 
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It will be a fun couple of weeks. I still used the bigger LEDs for the dashlights, since they have white filters that may decrease light output. I really had to shave down the LEDs, though. You're also gonna need some very thin, coated magnet wire for the cruise section to make it fit better. I had to drill some holes on the side of some of the switches to run wires.

 
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This is much appreciated, I have begun the work on my DIY today, I'll post the results in a couple of days, I have college too so it may take me a while to complete the job, but when I do it will look sick! Thanx!

 
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I've received my 75 blue LEDs. I ordered an additional 30 3mm white LEDs. Going to do the inner speedometer (mph here in Canada) with White LEDs. Will post results and work-in-process pics when I'm done. Probably won't start until I get the white ones in, should be here early next week.

 
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I think EL audio is gonna have the best setup after he's done. But I'm glad to see more people are trying this.

 
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EL, if you need any help I just live in Mississauga, so feel free to give me a shout.

 
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Thanks Alien. I should be OK, I've done considerably more complex projects for work (and school before that).

I did a full layout of where each LED is going to go. I'll post it up here tonight when I get home from work. In total I have something like 32 blue LEDs and 9 white LEDs in the cluster alone. Can't wait to get my white LEDs and get cracking.

By the way, I HIGHLY recommend www.LSDiodes.com. Really low prices, excellent customer service AND fast shipping. Got here in 5 business days from Oregon (to Toronto). They even threw in a few free LEDs as samples. I got a three colour one (Blue, Red, Green) and a few UV (blacklight) ones. Not sure what I'm going to do with them, but pretty cool though!

 
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Yep, that site's pretty good or I wouldn't have recommended it . Have to post up lots of pictures when your done EL.

 
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Here's what I plan to do:



Might look a bit daunting at first, but let me explain.

What I'm planning to do it to fabricate plastic mounting plates underneath the gauge faces. In these plates, I'm going to drill a hell-of-a-lotta holes and insert the LEDs into them. I'll also drill very small holes to poke the leads from the LEDs to the top surface, where I'll solder everything up, add the resistors, etc.

I got material for the plastic mounting plates from my work. I'm going to cut out circles from a Lincoln Aviator step pad cover. It's made out of TPO (Thermo-Plastic Olefin). This is the stuff that automotive bumpers are made out of, flexible, tough and especially: will not crack if drilled, poked or prodded at!

The small blue and white circles represent the Blue and White LEDs. I've connected some of them together using lines. The LEDs that are connected will be wired in parallel. I've also assigned numbers to different parallel groups and single LEDs. These numbers, 1-6 correspond the stock bulb locations (EDIT:they're in the red boxes in the pic, but you can't read them at this resolution. UGH!). I'm going to tap power from these locations into each parallel circuit or LED.

After taking apart my cluster, examining it for a while, I realized that two capacitors and the some type of round component (I think it may be the turn-signal clicker) would get in the way. What I'm going to have to do is remove them off the circuit board and re-route them to behind the tach. There's lots of empty space, as you can see. This is marked by the green circles and green arrow.

Also, the stock light-guides have to go. Completely. Won't need them anymore with what I'm doing! I've marked in pink where I'm gonna chop them. To light up the needles, I'll use 2 blue LEDs - as Gearbox did. The stock bulbs will be completely removed so there will be (some) space to play with.

Lastly, I created a pretty big problem for myself. Since I'm using white LEDs to light up the smaller speed graduations (mph), the amber red-line zone and other amber bars, I'll have to create shields to prevent light from escaping the blue and white LEDs. I have various expanded PVC foam tapes, plastic strips and such from work. We also buy Cyanoacrylate glue (crazy glue) by the gallon, so I have lots of that, too. I'm gonna have to mount a shield with a gasket around each white-LED area...

Whoa. Work will begin soon - probably next week. I'm hoping to complete this by the end of next weekend - final and work-in-process pics to follow.


Here's a pic of my stock cluster, for reference: