GEN III LED Gages + more

[Captain Ledd]

They do show up brighter than the camera makes them out to be.

I used white LED's, not the super blue kind, but the actual white colored ones and it came out this kind of "dark cyan" as best as I can describe it. While it isn't bad looking, I was actually hoping for a vibrant green.

So I poked around a bit more and found that the '95+ Ranger dashes (or at least my '97) actually have a blue filter behind the gages and not a green one like I thought. This puzzled me greatly so I called up one of my college buddies who did theater lighting for the school and got my answer.

The original bulbs behind the gages (incandescents) produced a light at a low color temperature (more in the red/yellow spectrum) and when this got through to a blue filter, it turned green (because the primary colors yellow and blue make green, which I kicked myself for not thinking of earlier).

So in order to help correct this problem one of my future purchases will be amber replacement LED's which will hopefully get back that green color (I actually like it), I would just replace it with LED bulbs in the same color temperature, but I haven't found any where that offers those. Shipping is a flat rate so I'm waiting until I can find several uses for bulbs and order them all at once.

Also, my new search has revealed they offer more bulbs, such as the high intensity 360° ones in colors now. While I have the 1-bulb moderate power LED replacements I thought about these because they don't shine in front at all, just around the sides. though they still might be too bright.

Originally I was going to wire up my map reading lights with one of the plates (I'd guess you'd call it that) where it's a square or round chip with LED's arranged on it. But now I've found these:

Which look like they freakin rule.

 

[a-5 freak]

Nice! why are you using led's in the first place though? just to be different?