guage cluster possibilities

A proceeded to take apart the cluster and found out a few things. I Took it to work an experimented with various types of neon rope lights and such. Not much luck really. The ropes are not bright enough and LEDs don't diffuse wide enough. The incondecent will never be the right color.

Although, new to my knowledge, The non removable natural tint on the cluster backdrop is more or less blue..




bluing the cluster is not impossible but tricky so far.
In the above images, it's being illuminated with a high intensity white LED.

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most of the front half

the backish of the speedo - not a hell of a lot to it

the main board

the light board


Another little tidbit of info:
The speedometer needle has the mechanical span of reading 145-150mph
The tach looks like it should be able to read ~9000 rpm (not that that's likely to be seen ever)

yea the tack/speedo spins free almost in one full circle before you start moving the spring and messing up the 0* mark.
an old riv member on regalgs did the white led's to have blue dash, he had a dark cherry metallic 97 riv, (cant remember his SN)
IIRC the bad side to the LED's was poor light diffusion (intense in parts and dim in others) and the mileage/PRND was still green on the dash.
i have a spare dash cluster if you need it btw

If you place a piece of sanded (frosted) acrylic in front of an LED, it diffuses the light somewhat.

Do you happen to have a picture of the factory non removable tint inside the gauges? I just helped a friend of mine on his 2006 WRX and we scraped the original green tint off then installed some theater lighting blue film in its place with some leds wired in and it looks sweet as hell. What I am wondering is can the original tint be scraped off?

looks like u got some work going on there codith

sanded acrylic dose diffuse the light but a better way to do that would be get a slightly thicker one and put a whole bunch of led's in holes drilled around the outside use hotglue to secure it to the base and blowtorch the hole BEFOR the led goes in to alow for a smoth iner surface will also work with clear acrylic (its how they make led bar signs) but those usually have led's on the top only all the way around will allow for a more even distribution of the light if you do that send me pics of the end result ive been thinking about makeing a table like that for a while now just havent goten around to it (another good way of doing lighting is cold cathode tubes) they are decently bright and cand be found at any computer mod shop not shure about what youd have to do to convert them to run off car power tho

GothicVash, that seems like a good idea, but we can't understand what you're saying unless you use commas and periods.

...,,,,, happy i get that all the time its not that hard to understand read it as one giant sentence and thought i know my grammer and spelling are bad but thats just me

I understood him. That might work better, but might be too bright with all those LEDs? Also, it seems like a lot of work!

yeah would be a pita but i think it would look good you dont need like 50 leds prolly id guess around 12 or so would look really good mabey or you could get the multi color ones/ blinking ones and do all kinds of crazy stuff with em