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Thread: How To: B13: Installing New Gauge Cluster Bulbs

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Posts: 1-10 of 33
2009-05-10 08:44:36
#1
How To: B13: Installing New Gauge Cluster Bulbs
Here are some additional posts that will likely be useful to fill in any gaps this guide might have or to give more detail:

HOW TO: Change dash light bulbs - SR20 Forum

http://www.sr20-forum.com/cosmetic/154-how-b14-installing-new-cluster-gauge-lights.html

Disconnect the negative battery cable from your car battery. Oh, and what follows is what I did. This is probably not the only way to do this, nor is it probably the best way. Please understand that I know more about agricultural BMPs than I do about cars, so please don't think that this guide is error-free or complete. Your car will be a little different from mine and while I hope this helps you, I am not responsible for any damage to either your car or you. If you want to hold me responsible, then do not use this guide...

First you will need to move the center stack out of the way. It just has to move a couple of inches to allow the cluster to slide out, so not everything needs to be disconnected. Pop the shifter boot out of place first. The center stack is held in place by two screws above the CD bin and two below/behind the ashtray. Then there are some clips near the vents that need to be popped out.




Slide it out of the way. Now remove the 4 screws around the knee panel and put it in the backseat. [The "stupid fuse" part may come into play later.]





Now it is time to take off the hoodie, the piece of the dash trim just outside of the gauge cluster. There are two screws on the top of the hoodie and two on the bottom near where you took off the knee panel screws.







Then pop out the tabs around the vent just over the dimmer switch. These pics show where they are located:




Slide out the hoodie (you'll need to slide the steering wheel to its lowest point to get it out) and then disconnect both the mirror adjuster and dimmer switch:



Pop the dimmer switch out of the panel and reattach it to its connector and leave it hang. Without it the dash lights will not work, so you'll need it in place to make sure that the lights are working once you replace the bulbs:



Here comes the second most fun part of the whole experience: removing the speedo cable from the back of the cluster (the most fun part is trying to reattach the cable...). Crawl under the dash until your head is pressing the brake pedal. You'll want to stick your hand up into the space noted by the picture below and follow the speedo cable tube to the back of the cluster.



Check out this post for a good description about how to disconnect it:
SR20 Forum - View Single Post - HOW TO: Change dash light bulbs

Just push down on the release button and it should slide right off the cluster. Once that is done you are ready to remove the instrument cluster. Remove the 2 screws on the top of the cluster and two at the bottom edges.







Slide out the cluster until it is almost sitting on the steering column. There are 4 connectors on the back that need to be disconnected:



Tilt the gauge cluster one way or the other to give you enough space to reach behind and disconnect the connectors. Three of them have tabs on both top and bottom, like this one:





The 4th one was a real pain in the butt. It is attached to a little black box and I found it easier to just take out the screw that holds the black box to the cluster, remove the cluster, use pliers to get the connector off the black box, then reinstall the black box on the removed gauge cluster.

Once the 4 connectors are disconnected, remove the gauge cluster and flip it over. The three main bulbs you are looking are shown in black on the pic below, simply give them a 1/4 twist and pull out to remove them.



The three bulbs should have a blue coating on them:



I broke the bulb (as shown in the pic above) when I tried to remove it by pulling straight out and fatally damaged the socket in the process. Turns out that mine were wired directly to the socket, they are not meant to be swapped out. If this is the case with yours (others do not have this problem), be prepared with new sockets you already bought from parts stores. This pic shows two brands (same size) that I successfully used on my cluster:



Here is the black new socket vs the grey OEM one:



For my replacement bulbs I used LEDs from superbrightleds.com. I got the WLED-x5 wide angle bulbs found here:
Product Listing - CAR

I bought blue, but it really made everything super blue, like a VW (see pics at the end of this post). I also ordered cool white, but I have not tried them as of yet. Here's a pic with the LED in the new socket:



I took test leads with alligator clips on each end and connected one lead to each metal post on either side of the socket, then put the red cable on the positive battery terminal and black cable on the negative terminal of the car battery to make sure I had the bulbs in correctly and that they lit up. [If you know what you're doing, what I just said should make sense. I had a guy at Autozone show me how to do it and you should do the same if you haven't used test leads in this way before!] Once I tested all three, I put them all back in the gauge cluster. Apparently, on some B14s the LEDs will not fit in the hole in the back of the cluster, and Vadim's guide referenced at the beginning of this post discusses how he got around that if you run into that problem. I didn't.

Now put the cluster back onto the steering column and plug the 4 connectors back in. Somewhere around here, I blew a fuse so I didn't do something correct and I don't know what, so be careful. Reattach the negative battery cable and test the lights. If all three work, great! If only one or two work, pull out the ones that aren't working (decide if you want to disconnect the battery cable again, I have no idea if you need to or not) and flip them around and try again. Hopefully that fixes it. If none work, make sure your dimmer switch is attached and it isn't dimming the lights. If none of them are working, check the fuse. The fuse can be found here under the dimmer switch:




Replace fuse as necessary. Hopefully all three are working now and you can reinstall everything in the reverse order you took it off. The speedo cable was a pain to get reattached, but 20 minutes of fiddling with it finally found it slide into place. I held down on the release tab as I tried to get it back together, but I don't know if that did anything. Here's what my end result was:



Hope this helped. Good luck!


Update!!

A couple of quick things. I just swapped clusters because my speedo gauge was no longer working, so I did this once again. This time, I got really tired of dealing with the speedo cable, so it was time to start hacking.

WARNING: Even though I cannot imagine that this piece is actually important for anything, somebody here will likely tell me that by cutting the piece off that I just did my car will suddenly implode. Do your own research and figure out for yourself if it is a good idea to remove it before following what follows.

The stupid casing for the speedo cable really makes getting my hand behind the dash really difficult. So after much pondering, I could not figure out what it could possibly be doing other than making my life hell. So I took a hacksaw blade and started cutting the one attachment point (it is attached by a screw, but it seems to me that the screw head is almost impossible to access without tearing out the whole dash). Here is a pic (the hacksaw blade is yellow):



The green arrow points to where I'm cutting:



After 10 minutes, I cut through the tab and it just slid out. Here's what it looks like:



The green circle marks where I cut:



And here's the result, tons of space for the hand!




Lastly, I mixed up the bulbs. The blue was nice, but I missed not seeing the redline. So I decided to keep the two bulbs on the sides blue, and put a cool white LED (from the same place) in the middle. The second pic is blurry, but I think the colors are more accurate:





I will live with it for a bit and see if I just go back to pure white. Since I cut that stupid thing out, it won't be such a pain to swap out bulbs!!
2009-05-10 22:21:11
#2
Great writeup!

Man that's a lot more work then on B14's...
2009-07-23 19:16:27
#3
did you also do the AC panel as well or is it the same as the b14?
2009-07-24 07:31:15
#4
You might tryto loosen the speedo cable on the other end for ease of getting it back together
2009-07-24 17:25:22
#5
Can you change it to blue numbers with red arrows? Or does the light bleed through too much?
2009-08-11 15:26:18
#6
Is the color even with those bulbs ?
It may be the pic but it seems to have "hot spots"
2009-08-11 18:51:14
#7
when I did it it was pretty darn even - and no, you can't change to blue numbers with red arrows, the light is too bright. If you went with a white light and painted the pointers a transparent red of some sort, maybe...

superbrightleds.com is where I got all mine from.

oh and the led's he used go in but you have to angle them in - so dont go any bigger than the 5 (i think it's 5) bi-directional led's.
2009-08-11 19:20:35
#8
You can get red needles, this topic shows how:

Howto rode tellernaalden

I didn't see it in real yet and never have done this myself because I prefer undoable mods. But I still think the result is pretty cool.

p.s. The language is in Dutch but I believe the pics are sufficient to get you going.
2009-08-12 13:28:12
#9
Originally Posted by mafoose
Can you change it to blue numbers with red arrows? Or does the light bleed through too much?


I don't think that would work with these bulbs, even if you sharpied the needles red. With the blue bulbs I can't really see the redline, so I imagine that red needles would also not really show up.

Originally Posted by eggman
Is the color even with those bulbs ?
It may be the pic but it seems to have "hot spots"


It seems pretty even to me, but I have not paid a ton of attention to that and my cluster is partially blocked with the GPS I use as a speedo since my speedo is broken.
2009-08-12 22:47:19
#10
i'm gonna do this, but i ddnt see how many bulbs are needed?

my guess is 3 but i could be wrong


looks awsome
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