Rebuilt my LED lightbar

[Jesse Veitch]

The seal had gone in my lightbar on the spoiler, I could see some corrosion in there and it worked intermittently.. and the LEDs that did work, when they worked, weren't very bright..

The solution was 35 new  2.1V 3500MCD 30degree LEDs, not super brights but decent ones.. with a wider viewing angle than the stockers..

I cut around the top of the lens assembly with a razor blade to break the rest of the seal, and then popped the top off.

I removed the PCB board holding all the LEDS in the lens assembly and cut the wires right at the PCB board so I could work on it off the car.

Then I desoldered the 70 connections in total using solder wick so soak up the old stuff.. I then inserted the 35 new LEDS paying close attention to polarity... this is the longest part. (the desolding and solder removal)

Now solder in your new LEDS and you're good to go.. this goes by pretty quickly if you've handled a soldering iron much, if not it's great practice.. my pic here of my soldering focused on the ground instead, oops.. they're cell phone pics, you get the point though.




Here's the front with all the new LEDS soldered in.




Ta-Da.




And the closeup






I dig it.. Next up I'm gonna do something about those FUGLY blue reverse lights in there... might try out one of these bad boys..

http://www.rpelectronics.com/English/Content/Items/LXHL-MW1D.asp

should be able to see backing up with that sucker!


and then I'll end up doing a whole tail light LED conversion.. but I haven't quite decided yet how I want to orient them in the housing, I might do something DB9 style with with a 2 LED wide strip of them around the perimeter of the brake light, or maybe civic style just cross hatch evenly spread around.. leaning towards somekind of Austin Martin DB9 look alike I think..

[Zach Holt]

cool cool nothing like the little tuchs to change a car to one of a kind in every little way nice stuff Jesse

[Jesse Veitch]

Thanks Zach, today I took a couple pics comparing the light output of the stocker LED to the new ones I put in.

In the first pic you can't even tell the stocker is on, I had to move it half the distance from the paper as the new one to even see any light patern next the beast on the right... Both LEDs wired in parallel from the same power source.