Ok here are a couple of photos before and after switching and yes the incandescent lighting is a little brighter with the power supply but not much. The too long LED bulbs are held in with tape so there is some leakage, I needed more tape on the tach and it is sealed better. I wonder what the center panel gauges are going to look like with two LEDs, they are not colored, right?
So how the heck did I end up with a green speedo and a blue tach??
The first picture looksā¦ green?! Almost as if the bulb itself was only glowing orange and just not making it through the filter!
I think filters are available.
All instruments are the same colour. Earlier cars blue, later cars green. The blue one does look good, it must have broken long ago and was replaced by a blue spare. Itās from Jan 65, on a 67 car.
Are the bulbs 2.2W? 12v? If you can decipher something.
In my opinion thereās only one argument against the LEDs and that is that they donāt get warm enough to dry the instruments. That can mean fogging up and so on. Depends on your climate.
A few points:
1 The filters start life nice and clear, but time is hard on them. They dry out, get dusty, get burned by high wattage bulbs, and generally degrade.
2 Believe it or not, all LEDs are UV emitters. They are doped with UV sensitive phosphors to make visible light. The white phosphors are biased to blue, so you lose a lot of light with a green filter.
3 The best solution is to remove the filters and use green LEDs.
4 LED light is highly directional. You may need many chips and a complex diffuser to match the spread of a filament lamp. I have bags of bulbs that didnāt make the grade.
5 There are no standards and little consistency, you may never be able to buy the same bulb twice Pretty much all of them come from random Chinese factories
6 Lumen ratings are based on the raw chip. With phosphor, diffuser and filter in play, results can be disappointing
Thanks guys, especially David and Michael, for the input. I ordered a pack of five E10 base green LEDs from Amazon last night, I hope they work. SuperbrightLEDS only has white ones in that base configuration. Iāll try them out in my tach and see how they compare to a couple of shortened white ones in my speedo with the hazy green filters.
So is there any easy way to extract the colored filters? The plastic although no longer clear is still pretty tough.
The filters are riveted in. Theyāre easily drilled out, and if youāre careful, you can save them.
Here is a picture of the interior of the speedo. You can see the rivets holding the green filters. Some install led strip lights inside the speedo can to achieve a more uniform color.
Another source of LEDs is Ba9s Bax9s E10 Ba7s Indicator Instrument Panel Bulbs | Autolumination. They have many different bulbs with different lumens. I used their BA9s for my legend strip.
Here is all drilled out with LED
Itās the best!
I received the green LEDs from Amazon today and here are a couple of photos. The speedo is the white LEDs with the green filters, which actually are not in bad shape, you can see through them whereas the blue ones I could not. The tach is the green LEDs with the blue filters removed. The photo is not quite representative, they look better in real life. The second photo is the LEDs outside of the sockets. Iām a little underwhelmed, but this is definitely an improvement. I guess the directionality of the LEDs is coming into play, the lights that I put in the Corvette had chips around the circumference of the āelementā as well as at the end. Iāll play around a little more but Iāll probably end up removing the green filters and going with green LEDs in both units.
Better than nothing. Is the voltage okay at the bulbs?
The change from blue to green was in September 1966 by the way. I agree that it is very hard to photograph in any way resembling how it actually looks.
To make it simple and newā¦on the dash gages they just make each gage new, NONE come with filtersā¦
So all you really doing is the tach and speedo, if you like.
Once they are removed its a new world.
Volts really dont play a roll,they are on or off. Its grounding that does and either they work or they are dead.
Remove the filters and join the 20th century.
gtjoey1314 good luck
psmy picture a couple of responses ago was with a blanket on the from windscreen and sides.
It 40 percent less than the picture or perfect for driving
Hereās a photo of strip lights in the big dials and bulbs in the small. Thereās a āfloatingā rheostat on the strip lights. The intensity on the small instruments is a bit low, but as long as I can see that the needles arenāt pegged to one side or the other, theyāre fine. The etypeUK site has scads of old strings on this subjectā¦believe thereās even a dedicated section. Lots archived here as well.
To get the filters out do you have to dissemble the instruments? If so how do the needles come off without damage?
The needles stay where they are. Getting the ring off is the hard part. The way I know them is that the whole instrument inside lifts out as one piece.
@j_limongelli I have a really hard time deciphering the second part, now I think I get it, but youre right the LED isnāt as voltage sensitive.
Thatās a good question Art, I did not want to take the instrument apart. It was the tach I that had the blue filters I wanted to remove. The plastic is pretty thin so I went after it surgically with an X-Acto knife and was able to cut and remove fairly large pieces. There were a few small bits that settled behind the glass but removing the clock gave me access to clean those up. But with the speedo I donāt have that luxury, that could force me into using the white lights and leaving the green filters as is. If you have acess to an ultrasonic cutter I bet that would work great.
As for voltage, at this time my dash panels are removed for recovering. I have a 12V 2 amp power supply hooked up for now so I know voltage and grounding are good. I have my fingers crossed for no surprises once everything is back in situ. I replaced all of my wiring when I did the resto so itās in pretty good shape.
My car was built in late October, 1966 so just after the blue ā green transition I guess.
When you buy Led bulbs, the same type of bulb comes in different light patterns. You can buy Ledās in wide angle, inverted lenses (similar to wide angle) and focused patterns. I agree, I think you need to remove the green lenses and try again with some wide angle green Led bulbs. If that is still underwhelming, the next step is strip lighting.
Update for Art on removing the colored filters. I decided to take them out and use the green LEDs in the speedo. Looking at them from the back, as in the photo above, if you push gently on the plastic at the rivet attachment point with a dental pick or small screwdriver they will break away quite easily. Do that on both sides and then yank them out with a pair of needlenose pliers. The filters are very thin and will come out easily.
I now have both gauges lit up and looking good, a photo would not do them justice. Most of the light on these bulbs comes out the end and that is probably compromising the illumiation. One thing I did was line the side of the instrument ācanā with reflective tape, this helped light up the entire circumference of the dial.
The usual that I bought these from should have done a better job of supplier selection on these LEDs assuming there is a range of dispersion. Iāll be giving them feedback on that fwiw.
So I guess I could remove the filters without taking everything apart. And if things go south then plan B take it apart. Iāll check to see if Amazon has the wide-angle that James mentioned.
One other thing what wattage bulbs are needed for a series2?
Since the optical lens part is plastic I would begin by removing material and see if the light pattern canāt be perfected!
Art, at this point I see two option for you. If you are not in a hurry these might work after removing the filters:
But you might also give these a try with the filters. The 150 degree looks like it will fit, the 360 degree might be too long. Note that they have both 6 and 12 volt listed.
https://www.superbrightleds.com/search/led-products/e10/
In one of my photos above the blue tach looks great while the green speedo is dim. These were with the directional LEDs. I am guessing that was because the filters were much different, the blue was very clouded and you could not see through it while the green was still transparent. You can kind of see that in my first photo as well. Maybe the clouding of the blue filter did a better job of scattering the light from the LEDs? As fpr wattage, these bulbs draw very little current, superbrightleds lists the two as 0.6 and 0.35W. The original filament bulbs were 2.2W.
Good luck.
