LED taillights, turn signals, marker lights & headlights!

[dcb]

thinner wire would help too, like in the pictures.

[NeilBlanchard]

Yeah -- I was afraid that thinner wire would heat up... It was hard to tell what gauge the wire was, and I used what I had.

[dcb]

"It is made from 0.025" dia. steel wire and it is 6" long. Those dimensions give the wire 0.079 ohms."

some twist-tie stuff he had laying around. It has to be the right length/composition/diameter wire in order to provide the correct resistance.

[NeilBlanchard]

I will try some twist tie(s)...

...and using ~6" of steel twist ties works!

[bgd73]

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

Okay, I ordered the blinking unit from Super Bright LEDs -- and I ordered some brighter miniature wedge base bulbs for the license plate and front marker lights, and some for the side turn signals; and a set for my wife's xD... yeah, I got carried away. :-)

I may get ambitious about this as well. I just got the four leds in today, I like the precise colors... there is no heat.
I bought the extremely efficient 1 bulb led lights, two for marker (swamped by a bigger bulb right next to it.. it is rather silly), and two to calm down my license plate light in the back.. it looked like reverse lights, (they are that bright with 194) sitting in the middle of the tailgate. I spotted the resistors inside the bulbs base and new the volt guage was going to do something different switching on and off. Sure enough,the guage drops after turening lights off, instaead of climbing. I reversed an old situation. The cool temps will leave my tailgate handle alone in the winter, sitting in its all aluminum surroundings.. the leaky volts and heat of 194 was proven wrong in myown setup (it just needed 20 years to reveal it)

thanks for the ideas here.. I may go with the led flashers and multi bulbed for 1156/1157 next.

[NeilBlanchard]

Buy the load independent flasher! My twist tie "resistor" failed in a few minutes of using the 4-way flashers... It is not a good mod!

One of the solder pads also lifted off during the second unsoldering, making a repair quite tricky; but I managed to get the original wire loop back in and connected. I'll live with the hyper flashing until Wednesday...

BTW, the headlight design and replacing the main headlight and the turn signal on the driver's side in particular -- is a major PITA! You either have to remove both the battery and the fuse box, or remove the headlight unit -- which then requires you to remove the grill and the bumper cover... sheesh. It ain't designed for us shade tree mechanics, that's for sure.

I managed by the skin of my teeth to get the turn signal back in by removing the fuse box cover, and loosening the headlight unit, and fashioning a wire hook -- and bending over for about a half and hour; putting a kink in my back, scraping my knuckles, and cussing at the stoopeed cramped and convoluted access to the turn signal bulb...

[bgd73]

That sounds complicated. I may stay with the 1156/7 original after all.

I dropped in the 4 led, single bulb version and noticed it right away in the volt guage.. I know for certian the 5w claim on 194 could be 10 ten times that given the heat.

I also heard a ticking noise coming from the distributor...the last I heard this was with an alternator change (low volts back to normal).. so whatever those little lights did changed even the runtime of distributor. I am guessing LED acts as a diode.

anyhoo... they are nice to look at...my old bulbs lit up a darn parking lot.


edit: I added upthe total watts to .144x4=.576

yes that is about half a watty for four leds.
versus the mega sucker of 20 watt minumum and hot sockets. No regrets at all..another note of change is the dash lights have a cleaner illumination.. I do not know how it did this. Same brightness..just "cleaner"

[NeilBlanchard]

Those are bright enough for your car? I tried the mini wedge LEDs I have in my license plate, and they are not as bright as the incandescent; and the rated output on them was ~9300mcd which if my memory serves is far bright than the ones you are using. It must be the way they sit in the fixture?

I ended up ordering these for the license plate illumination: WLED-xHP Specifications and for the marker lights on the front of my xA. I got these for the front marker lights on my wife's xD: High Power SMD WLED-xHP5 (194 type) 360 degree Wedge Base bulbs Specifications because of where they sit in the reflector.

My big question now is will they be okay with the heat from the main headlight bulb?

Getting the load independent blinker is easy enough -- I'm just wondering if getting brighter units would not have been better:

3 Watt Luxeon 7440/7443 Bulb Specifications
High Power 3-LED 16mm Wedge Bulb Specifications

These are much brighter, but while they have wide angle LEDs, they are narrower than the units I did get:

15-LED 7443/7440 Bulb Specifications

[dcb]

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

Buy the load independent flasher! My twist tie "resistor" failed in a few minutes of using the 4-way flashers... It is not a good mod!

What was the failure mode?

Maybe that mod isn't for everyone, and $13 is a cheap alternative. But it looks like it has worked out for a few people though. Lifting pads is a sign of too much heat in dissasembly. I did mic some kitchen drawer twist tie and it was 0.015" not 0.025" so still not the right wire. And we don't know the failure mode either. Though I don't know if anyone bothered to test it with 4 way flashers either.

Anyway, you have a cheap workaround

[NeilBlanchard]

It worked for the turn signals, but once I tried the 4-way flashers, it failed. Once it failed, it would flash only once, and even then, I would have to wait a few seconds before hitting the switch again.

There are 2 smaller devices (I think they are relays) inside the flasher unit, along with a small chip and a few other components. I think that the 2 are for the 2 sides of the turn signals, and when you turn on the 4-way flashers, both relays work at once, and the increased current caused the twist tie to heat up, which increases the resistance, and it acts as an open circuit, and the lights do not flash. There must be a reason why they used a thick-ish steel wire in the first place. The first piece I tried was of a similar gauge.

The new flasher units and all the rest of the LEDs are coming in a few days...