LED needles anyone?

[HDi--Power]

Wanted to do this for a while so finally got around to adding smr leds to my dial needles. I used 2 on the small needles and 4 on the big needles. 
The needles have their own power feed and can be dimmed or brightened as desired
Lots of hacking is needed to get these into the dials though and standoffs need to be made to make them sit just below the needles just microns from your dial workings. its not a mod for the faint hearted but you can in theory make colour change needles etc using this system.

I also used light diffusion paper to remove bright spots and soldered leds right onto the board for back lighting.

Anyway here are some pictures, hard to capture on camera but they look great in real life without bright spots etc (looks like there are some though in pictures, just the camera) It looks like they glare a bit too but its much cleaner again, in reality.

Interesting mod that I haven't seen done before on here.

[Niall]

Looks awesome! Ive always wanted to do this but with blue and red leds going clockwise so the faster you go or higher you rev the engine, the needle changes from blue to red. Would be awesome

[7057sam]

looks great

Should definitely do a guide for others

[HDi--Power]

That can easily be done on this system by making 1/2 of the smr's red and positioning accordingly but I chose all bright blue in the end for mine

[Poodle]

That looks fantastic! Not usually a fan of dial mods, those plasma ones look fecking awful for example, but that's as tidy as you like.

[Piggy]

Does look sweet

[Mattcheese31]

That's nice and like you say, haven't seen that before, come and do mine

[jonas306]

Looks good, i replace a few bulbs on mine, but started to flicker after a few weeks, so i will put stock again..

[Eeyore]

I feel a guide or at least closer photos are needed... i remember this being discussed years ago but nobody ever did it and everyone bought plasma dials.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPssDqWBHTw

in fact... someone made a guide years ago about changing speedos and fitting LEDS.

http://306oc.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?tid=9781

[HDi--Power]

The problem with a guide is there is a very large chance of screwing up your dials if you make one tiny wrong move and it involves soldering right to the circuit board.

Crazy leds made that video and they decided it was too difficult on a 306 to go mainstream with it due to the amount of delicate hacking required

[cully]

hacking chopping bashing is what we do best
write the guide its upto each individual to judge if they are competent to complete the task not you

the fun is in the f*cking up and getting over your mess up i find

[Fooby]

Agreed,

I want. So please make a guide so i can get someone else to do it for me

[Connor]

That video is a good idea, but some improvments Id want for my own car;
Fuel needle, staying blue and then immediately red instead of the fuel warning
Coolant needle staying blue till just past 80 and then a steeper transition to red at 90-100
Speedo would definitely need to start going red after 70 lol
And rev gauge would need to start going red when coming on boost (for appropriately induced cars)

[Poodle]

So there's guides for things like steering and brakes, but you don't want to do a guide for dials in case people get it wrong..? Tbf i guess going through a wall when my brakes fail doesn't come close to comparing to how devastating a couple of dark spots on my dials would be...

If you don't mind making a guide it would be appreciated, failing that could you upload some decent pictures so we can work it out for ourselves?

[HDi--Power]

I'll see what I can do when I have them apart again. Maybe it came across wrong its just brakes etc are easy and big solid bolts whereas this is kind of more super fine work that after doing it I felt was almost not worth the hassle that it took.

But i'll take some close up pics and explain how I did it and if people want to I guess they can work away and try it

[Mattcheese31]

Do it, it looks awesome and I'm a clever monkey, bet I could do it too

[cully]

where did you get the LED rings i can't find them small enough ?