[stanstanton]

Hi All, Thanks for the info on LED's and where to get them from. Its a fairly simple job that makes a huges difference to the look of the car and knowing you will (hopfully) never have to change a bulb again helps. Its now firmly on the list of things to do, as long as I donot get to side tracked with minor things like Airbags, Ball Joints, Head Gaskets......The joys of a P38.

 

[stopover]

Wonderful, I have the list printed off but need to know which bulb(s) goes where? Hope you can help.

 

[pkg_p38]

Wonderful, I have the list printed off but need to know which bulb(s) goes where? Hope you can help.

easy. just pull your bulbs and match them with the LED replacements. all of them are the same size. the only ones that are different are the wedge bulbs for the puddle lamps and footwell lights, they're a little smaller.

everything else is plug-n-play. about the hardest thing you'll hafta do is take out the two screws on each of the dome lights above the rear seats.

its really simple!

 

[pkg_p38]

Hi All, Thanks for the info on LED's and where to get them from. Its a fairly simple job that makes a huges difference to the look of the car and knowing you will (hopfully) never have to change a bulb again helps. Its now firmly on the list of things to do, as long as I donot get to side tracked with minor things like Airbags, Ball Joints, Head Gaskets......The joys of a P38.

it really is a big difference. my passengers instantly notice the improvement and its gotten lots of complements.

esp during this time of year when its dark by 4pm, those lights are really nice when i walk out to my rover when i get off work. i can SEE!

 

[millsfowler]

I did the conversion!!! I LOVE IT!!!!


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[DarthDude]

Erm....... I hate asking this but because no one appears to have done so:-

Do they work with the dimmer? I don't think a normal LED with work with a dimmer- if these do then I'll be hopping onto this particular bandwagon myself!

 

[millsfowler]

Erm....... I hate asking this but because no one appears to have done so:-

Do they work with the dimmer? I don't think a normal LED with work with a dimmer- if these do then I'll be hopping onto this particular bandwagon myself!

They work just fine with the dimmer


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[marty_nz]

Mine also work fine with the dimmer. I don't think the dimming curve is quite as smooth as the normal tungsten lamps, but it's not really noticeable and the light output and illumination provided by the LED upgrade far outweighs it in my opinion!

Marty

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[DarthDude]

Hi Marty.....

Well I'm halfway through my interior lighting renewal and so far I've replaced the the incandescent bulbs in the HEVAC system, Instrument Binnacle and Fascia Switchpack.

LEDs have replaced the bulbs in the Centre Console (power window/sunroof) Switchpack, dome lights and map lights and rear power window switches. I'm installing footwell and puddle lights in the car and those will also be LEDs.

My question now is this- I'd like to replace the incandescent bulbs in the HEVAC LCD and Message Centre LCD with LEDs to prevent the heat from these bulbs from damaging the LCDs. My HEVAC LCD had already faded due to this and I'm seeing the beginnings of similar damage to the Message Centre LCD.

I managed to fix the HEVAC LCD but it was a right b*&&#r of a job and I don't want to have to do it again- ever!!

What sort of LEDs would you suggest/ used in your own conversion.

I've tried once with these:-




... and no joy- the light doesn't diffuse properly due I think not only to the highly directional beam coming from these but also the fact that the light source is a LOT closer to the screen compared to the original 286 incandescent bulb! Plus the green from the LEDs is unpleasantly unnatural and put me on edge all the while I was looking at it.


I'm thinking of trying again with these:-



Warm white will give a more natural hue and SMDs should place the light source further away from the screen.... but I don't want to go ripping the dash apart just to find out- if you've got a working LED solution already it'd be great if you could share it with me!

Cheers

 

[marty_nz]

The message centre... I've done a complete rebuild on mine (and the clusters I convert) - and the message centre screen is now edge-lit. I previously had 'modified it' so that i took the incandescent ones out, did a bit of chopping, and put a piece of styrene plastic across, with 5x wide angle LEDs in it, to evenly light across whole display.
I also scuffed the lens of the LED up a bit more with some fine (ish) sandpaper to diffuse the light coming out the front even more.






The HEVAC LCD...

I made an LED lamp out of 2 wide angle LED's (each one pointing slightly off centre on the horizontal axis, once in place), once again with the lenses scuffed up with sandpaper, and actually built them (with resistors) into the lamp base of the original incandescent bulb.



Sadly I don't have a picture of the front of the LED unit I built, but you can see the back of it here, and can see where I've drilled out the centre of the holder, and hot-glued the resistor etc in after soldering it all up.

Hope this helps..

Cheers,
Marty

 

[DarthDude]

Yes it does- thanks yet again Marty. I thought as much- that just going with the SMD's wouldn't help- but you just saved me a lot of time and aggro trying.

Cheers!

 

[CalebMacDowney]

That looks really good. I've looked on the superbrightled website and they seem to be back ordered on all the bulbs for the P38 😕 I'd really like to replace mine after seeing how much better led bulbs are.