martian's 2001 buick build log

[martiandancer31 10+ year member]

Looks good bro.

now I just need some trophies.

 

[martiandancer31 10+ year member]

well well well. Stuff has been getting done on this but i didn't finish up with the semester until friday the 16th so not so much epic progress. Currently, i'm working on replacing all the dash/gauge/interior lights with blue and white LED's to match my head unit. A minority of the indicators were LED's in the first place, so I just had to remove them, replace, and change out the resistors. Others were incandescent lights, so I needed to remove them, add a series resistor, and solder in the LED. If you're not sure what I mean and would like to do this yourself feel free to ask questions on here or PM me and i'll try to explain better.

first, remove the old LED:

heat up both the leads and pull it out

here, i have replaced the bottom 4 which were originally orange LEDs, with white LED's. Also, the two LED's in the middle are blue, and replaced incandescent bulbs that were burnt out. You can see the series resistors that have been added.

close up of LED/resistor combo:

board is finished and ready to go back in the car:

you'll notice in the last pic that one of them isn't working, that'd be the one for the fan control. I goofed a little bit when I set that LED up, I accidentally made it so that when the casing pressed on it it would cause a short that bypassed the series resistor, applied 12V directly to the LED, and caused a blowout. I did this twice before I figured out what the problem was lol.

More updates soon, I hope!!

 

[martiandancer31 10+ year member]

quick update: you can buy LED's designed to run off 12V here: 12 Volt LED

not a lot of info in terms of brightness, wavelength, etc, but there they are if you want to make your life simpler.

 

[silveradokid 10+ year member]

Man I wish I could do that do my dash lights! My head unit is blue as well, looks sweet! Side note, I'm looking forward to seeing the finish on your build

 

[martiandancer31 10+ year member]

Man I wish I could do that do my dash lights! My head unit is blue as well, looks sweet! Side note, I'm looking forward to seeing the finish on your build

you can if you want to!!! But it's a lot of effort. I do not look forward to driving my car without a gauge cluster so hopefully that goes smoothly and quickly.

functionally, i'm hoping the build will be finished by the time i go back to school in a few weeks!! //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/smile.gif.1ebc41e1811405b213edfc4622c41e27.gif

 

[silveradokid 10+ year member]

Ya I have no idea how to wire in those LED's, I tried to mod an old playstation controller once with an LED and I totally fried the board haha. I think the tip on my soldering gun is too large, but it definitely would look nice!! Maybe when I take apart the dash again Ill look at the A/C controls and see if I can do anything.

 

[martiandancer31 10+ year member]

Ya I have no idea how to wire in those LED's, I tried to mod an old playstation controller once with an LED and I totally fried the board haha. I think the tip on my soldering gun is too large, but it definitely would look nice!! Maybe when I take apart the dash again Ill look at the A/C controls and see if I can do anything.

good idea, and maybe practice soldering and de-soldering on like an old remote control or something before you go for the real thing?

 

[silveradokid 10+ year member]

Maybe haha. Don't know if i wan't to risk ruining my a/c controls. I'm not sure how to take them apart, but if it's not too difficult I might give it a try. I'm pretty good with soldering, I've done lots of it, the only problem when it comes to soldering small leds is my soldering gun is over 50 years old, but works like a champ. Because it's so old it is large and is hard to solder into small spaces. If you look on my build I soldered on led light board, I was successful at that. The part that worries me is the resistors, or diodes, whatever it is you used, I'm not sure what size to get or if I need one.

 

[martiandancer31 10+ year member]

Maybe haha. Don't know if i wan't to risk ruining my a/c controls. I'm not sure how to take them apart, but if it's not too difficult I might give it a try. I'm pretty good with soldering, I've done lots of it, the only problem when it comes to soldering small leds is my soldering gun is over 50 years old, but works like a champ. Because it's so old it is large and is hard to solder into small spaces. If you look on my build I soldered on led light board, I was successful at that. The part that worries me is the resistors, or diodes, whatever it is you used, I'm not sure what size to get or if I need one.

you could eliminate the resistors by using 12V LED's, the only problem is they're expensive and I can't even get data sheets for them. The normal blue LED's that I used have a wavelength of 470 nm and a brightness of 8000 mcd which is exactly the kind of specs I was looking for. Plus they cost I think $.22 a piece. Not too shabby.

also, figuring out which side of the incandescent bulbs is +/- is a huge pain, because incandescent bulbs have no polarity so it's not usually silkscreened on the pcb. Basically i just did some poke and hope with a multimeter to try and figure out which side was ground based on a trace that I knew was ground and marked everything off from there. Worst thing that can happen tho is you get the polarity wrong on the first try, they don't work, you take them out and flip them around. No big deal. Or you break the controls like you say, lol. I've been lucky thus far and not broken anything.

 

[silveradokid 10+ year member]

.22 a piece!?!? Now that's cheep! I wouldn't be opposed to the resistors it would just be hard to figure out which ones to get. I'm picking up a pen type soldering gun soon so I should be able to give this a try. Where did you buy your leds? I ordered replacedment bulbs for my instrument cluster so they will be blue soon, it will look pretty nice I think, since my hu is blue, and I have blue neon under all the seats.

 

[martiandancer31 10+ year member]

.22 a piece!?!? Now that's cheep! I wouldn't be opposed to the resistors it would just be hard to figure out which ones to get. I'm picking up a pen type soldering gun soon so I should be able to give this a try. Where did you buy your leds? I ordered replacedment bulbs for my instrument cluster so they will be blue soon, it will look pretty nice I think, since my hu is blue, and I have blue neon under all the seats.

i bought everything from mouser.com - the LED's i bought were C503B-BAS-CY0C0462 Cree, Inc. Standard LED - Through Hole and the resistors were 291-430-RC Xicon Carbon Film Resistors - Through Hole , if that helps.

 

[silveradokid 10+ year member]

My build is all done, now you have to finish yours //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/laugh.gif.48439b2acf2cfca21620f01e7f77d1e4.gif

 

[martiandancer31 10+ year member]

My build is all done, now you have to finish yours //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/laugh.gif.48439b2acf2cfca21620f01e7f77d1e4.gif

believe me i am busting hump on this //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/nerd.gif.c6fa51ddf7ff75f1c0371fbc648f70ae.gif all that LED crap took me forever but i'm maybe 1-2 weeks away from having front speakers in the car which will be very nice.

 

[ciaonzo 5,000+ posts]

Didn't realize you had this going, John. Very ambitous, I'm well impressed!

Don't take this the wrong way but I chuckled when I saw the port setup.

Wish I could hear this. Still have the Pioneer I see.

 

[silveradokid 10+ year member]

believe me i am busting hump on this //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/nerd.gif.c6fa51ddf7ff75f1c0371fbc648f70ae.gif all that LED crap took me forever but i'm maybe 1-2 weeks away from having front speakers in the car which will be very nice.

Looking forward to seeing it. I might be attempting the led thing, not for a while though because I'm heading back to school soon.