LED dash light bar

[jckkys]

Rebuilt my in dash light bars after some of the tiny bulbs burned out. I found that the heat from these bulbs was melting the plastic boxes. After seeing the instrument illumination LEDs at BCBroncos, I wondered if their LED snake lights could replace those little incandescent bulbs in the light bars. No heat and long life make this appealing. Has anyone tried this? Would the dimmer on head light switch dim all the dash and auto trans selector lights together? I've never used LEDs with a dimmer.

 

[OklahomaBroncoB]

Not sure but you can get LEDs with pigtails and make the conversion

Sent from my DROID RAZR

 

[JacksonEOD]

LED's usually won't work with a dimmer. Sometimes they do though. It's a bit of a crap shoot. Often they start to dim a little bit, then shut off suddenly. Ohm's law is your friend on this one. You can try to determine the original resistance required to dim your stock lights, find out the voltage drop throughout your new led circuit, then use ohm's law to determine what resistance you need to make it work.

Or, you can get yourself a PWM and replace your stock dimmer...

 

[pullnpray]

Ypu have to get a PWM to dim a dc led circuit.. once the diode breaks over it shpuld always be the same, that said i have messed around when i went to instrumentation school and u can under power them after they break over at less then break over(turn up then slowly turn downand they will dim a little but its very inconsistent and you need very very fine adjustments.

 

[jckkys]

The PWM looks like a replacement for the dimmer on the headlight switch. Not sure I want to loose that. The light bars might be OK without a dimmer. I assumed the LEDs for the instrument cluster were dimming and as such, had some method to handle this so I'll call BC tomorrow to see if they addressed this. I saw that they put a load on the LED turn signals to make the flasher work; so they are aware of the implications of LED conversions. Also the snake lights do have pig tails.That's the snake part.

 

[pullnpray]

The extra load is so it doeant cook your flasher.. once it breaks over(lights up)the resistance goes way down..... also you could make a circuit that you could use your dimmer voltage as a reference to control the pwm pretty easy if you want to attempt that pm me i can help ya out..

 

[jckkys]

The advantage in using LEDs in the light bar is more about preserving irreplaceable (currently) parts then having the ability to dim them. The instrument cluster works acceptably with incandescent bulbs. I know that LEDs in red dot gun sights can be very bright even in sunlight and dimmed to the point night vision is required to see the dot. The current draw varies with the brightness and inversely with battery life, so there is a way.For now I'd be happy to have light bars that will work for 20 years. Maybe a sub contractor in the automotive parts industry will start making them again. There are a lot of Broncos with slots in the dash that serve no purpose since the light bars are long gone.

 

[thegreatjustino]

Rebuilt my in dash light bars after some of the tiny bulbs burned out. I found that the heat from these bulbs was melting the plastic boxes. After seeing the instrument illumination LEDs at BCBroncos, I wondered if their LED snake lights could replace those little incandescent bulbs in the light bars. No heat and long life make this appealing. Has anyone tried this? Would the dimmer on head light switch dim all the dash and auto trans selector lights together? I've never used LEDs with a dimmer.

You can get the light bars and LED lights specifically for them:

http://www.bcbroncos.com/store/product_info.php?cPath=35_116&products_id=1874

 

[kb5ynf]

Heck, I hadn't noticed that mine even had lights behind the labels. Now I have something else to fix!

 

[Hozr]

Blue Sea Systems makes digital dimmers just for LEDs. I converted all my dash lights to led and it works great.

 

[jckkys]

Called BC Broncos today, where I found they offer both a LED conversion kit and a service doing it for customers who send BC their light bars. I think the light bars are on the same circuit as the radio dial illumination and will dim with other dash lights. BC says that the LEDs just go out when the voltage drops to a certain value so it may be a good idea to power them off the parking-marker light circuit. The location and size of the light bars don't allow them to be a distraction unless they were extremely bright and that's easily fixed.