OK, so heres the run down. I did the LED cluster swap (blue) a few years back and used surface LED's from a LED light strip. They worked great. But recently i decided to re-do them in Red. So i bought the same strip but in red, removed the LED's and soldered them in place (only for the tach, spedo, fuel, and temp gauge). I pluged back in the cluster and none of the gauge lights work. all the other ones do (blue), but none of the new ones work. i double checked the polarities, and all were correct.

I didnt know if it was a short in the system, or just the LED's wont work. So i soldered a red led in to the left turn signal, because i knew that one still worked in blue. I plugged it back in again and the left red led didnt light up. so i figured it was just my red leds. but no.

so then i decided to remove all of the red leds, clean up the board of any excess solder, and test it with my multimeter. With all the gauge led's removed i plugged the cluster back into the harness, and ran a volt test on all of the ports. only 2 read voltage. the top port for the spedometer and the top port for the tach. so i soldered back in the blue led's there and.....no way, it worked! great. so i soldered in 2 more around the speedometer, but they didnt work. so i removed those, and tested the voltage with the multimeter. still none of the other ports had any voltage......

so my question is, are all of the gauge LED's dependant on ALL working properly? or is there a short somewhere? im so lost now. got such a big headache over this. ive been trouble shooting for like 2 days now.

 

Sorry to hear about the troubles.

You gotta remember that not every spot an LED goes gets its own power. Alot of them are arrays. If the chain is broken the LEDs that come after it wont light up. just like a bulb out on Christmas lights.

Also did you change out the resistors to get your old blue LEDs brighter? If you did you don't need them with red and that might be shorting them out.

 

Check your resistors. going from blue to red, you need to go back to OEM resistors I forgot what they were rated at....

The bottom portion of the board (seatbelt light, door ajar, etc...) is on its own circuit and is typically brighter than the upper portion (speedo, tach, etc..) just fyi.

 

I never changed the resistors. going from stock to blue was bright enough for me without the new resistors, so i never did that.

what you said sounds like what my problem is, one broken link. I'm just going to order the LED kit, cause the RED led's from the strip dont work on anything i have tried. so im just going to remove all of the LED's from the circuit board and start from scratch. But thanks a lot, its good to know they are not separately powered.

 

maybe your dimmer **** is turned down...