hotbox05

i finally got around to doing my clock , i was able to get 2 of 4 leds to work the other twos lil contacts on the balcs fell off so... gotta get 2 more. oh well. it's half blue

wgeee7478

If the contacts fell off, it probably means you are leaving the soldering iron on too long. If you have a cleanly wetted tip, it should take you no longer than a second or two to get in there do what you need and get back out.

hotbox05

hmm , guess i need to wet my tip , lol. oh well i'll fix it. thanx for the advice.

hotbox05

got em all in lemme post a pic or two , the pics look almost white but trsut they are a nice bright blue

hotbox05

there ya go .

wgeee7478

Heads up everyone in nor-cal you gots a new service available, Hotbox05 is now doing LED swaps. hehehe. Great job man, looks nice. Can't wait to see it at the next meet. Oh yeah, and you won't have to worry about the color burning off too.

hotbox05

yeah it should be good stuff , now i just gotta do the speedo , from what i've been told , the speedo ones are larger

wgeee7478

I thought somebody posted here that they were smaller? Well if you ever get a size for those, post up. I'm sure there's a lot of people that want that 411.

Max2k

The blue looks hot.

Has anyone done red or yellow yet?

Minsk99

I'm gonna do red in a day or two. The LEDs just came in today. That blue does look nice.

Questions for those who have done this mod. What size tip did you use for the soldering iron? These LEDs are small! I was planning on using a 1/32" tip. Think that's OK? Also, I got a few different LEDs to experiment with (all of them 1106). The different mcd are 15, 150, 250. I was planning on using the 15 mcd. Of the two LEDs that have the 15 mcd, one is red and has 90 deg. viewing angle and one is infrared and has a viewing angle of 120 deg. Any thoughts on what might work best? What have other been using for mcd values and viewing angle?

wgeee7478

Well for starters, DON'T use the infrared, cause you won't see anything! Infrared doesn't emit light, it emits RF signals, e.g. TV remote. 1/32 tip should work well with this type of work. As for the MCD. the higher you go, the more apparent the LED's become like my whites and Max2K's greens. But if you want to use higher mcd LED's, then you can always cut some tracing paper or somekind of frosted transparent paper and create a light filter right behind the LCD clock to diffuse the brightness a little. Just make sure you align the LED's in the correct orientation otherwise they won't light at all. You should be just fine. Post pics when done. Eventually we'll have a gallery for everyone to look at.

Minsk99

I actually got around to getting mine in this afternoon. The LED's I ended up using were red, size 1106 with an mcd of 15 and viewing angle of 90 deg. The color that shows up in the pictures is not as deep as they really look. I'm definitely happy with the color and they have an even luminescence. You can get them at eled.com. The part number is EPL3015EC.

I used desoldering braid to get the stock LEDs out. I initially tried using one of those desoldering suction tools, but that didn't work as well for this application. I would also recommend getting a thin tip for the soldering iron (I used 1/32") and using thin solder wire. I used 0.032 dia. Also a magnifying glass helps a lot.

If you are a novice at soldering, like me, I would get a bunch of extra LEDs and some circuit board to practice on first. I practiced soldering and unsoldering a bunch of times before doing it on the xB. I'm definitely glad I did.

hotbox05

looks good in red too , if u could do red and blue bam u got vw , thatd be a lil hard but would be worth it.

wgeee7478

That looks awesome Minsk. Great Job. And if you think about it this way, you gained 2 things from this project. A nice red backlit LCD clock and also soldering skills to do micro-electonics.

wgeee7478

So what colors are still missing? Anyone else want to post theirs?

hotbox05

the speedo seems to use size 1411. kinda rare size but of well it's approx 3.5mm by 2.0 or 2.2 mm. i installed some but damn if they werent aqua or indiglo in color compared to the blue they were stated as being. oh well i'll post some pics tomorrow.

hotbox05

heres the pics i posted about




the damn speedo came out aquaish but the pics look like theyre all the same perfect shade.

wgeee7478

Looks damn nice! How did you pull the speedo needles and set them back in w/o ruining the calibration? Anyway, for a darker shade of blue, you might have to look at the data sheet for the blues and see which one has a nice dark blue. Otherwise you will probably have to use some blue plastic film to make it darker. But in all honesty I think it looks fine and you should just leave it.

hotbox05

the needles are easy you just mark where they go when the car is off and set it up identical , i've done it about 5 times with these cars so not too hard anymore. sometimes i think my gas gauge is off but it seems to be witin half a milimeter so i'm all right with that.

Toasty_Bread

I recently put green LEDs in my clock and it looks awesome! I ordered them from eLed. com and paid my local electronics store $10 to solder the whole thing together. Less than $15 alltogether and i am happy