Dash light for EB - Ford Forums

dah_man_tim · 06-26-2006, 07:55

Hi im looking to change thew lights in My EB from that shitty orange, just wonded has anyone done it is it easy just some hints before i do take it off

fordboy98 · 07-04-2006, 01:25

I'm not real sure, but I think my old ED had orange dash lights as well. You may find that the orange colour was achieved by slipping a little plastic orange "sock" over the actual globe to give the orange colour. Remove the instrument cluster and pull out a globe to find out.

One old trick to change the colour of globes was to get a biro pen (not ink), get the ink out somehow and coat the globes with the rather gluggy and sticky ink. It worked because the ink was rather tacky and would stick to the globe, and it was dense enough to give a usable colour change. Texta is no good, as it is not dense enough.

Have a look and see!

cammy_g · 07-19-2006, 00:58

ive tried this a few times and the results are pretty annoying and disheartening. you can paint the globes with globe paints, you can change the globes to different colours (LED's), but the problem still remains that the orange is actually painted on the back of the dials. I found this out when i installed "directional" LED's, with a little colour shield on the side, all it gave me was a red circle in the middle of the dials. i the tried getting the paint off the back of the dials with a scourer and some turps, that really didnt work either. in the end i opted for a 80$ white/red/black dials kit off of ebay thinking this will remove the complications. wrong again. the light is not orange any more, its a pale yellow. It seems that the majority of the light is reflected from the globes through 3 large clear plastic V shaped components of the dash. i then painted the tips of those V's with a red paint and this was about as close to perfect as i could get it.

So dont screw around... buy

-several coloured LED's (without the little colour shield wrap on the outside)
-a new coloured dash kit
-some semi-opaque coloured paint to match the bulbs
-and a blue texta to colour in the High Beam light on the dash.

and prepare yourself for one of the fiddliest bastard jobs youll come across if you decide to go the whole hog

EA Wagon · 07-22-2006, 07:36

I have installed LED's as well, in the dash setup (Sports dash).
I used all different colours and brightness's.

The one thing I found with LED's is that they have only about 10 ° of viewing angle. There is a part of the dash (the insides) that stops the light from directly hitting the dash display, rather it disperse's light from the sides (little cutouts on the insides), this creates the subtle lighting. The incandesant lights can disperse this light, where as LED's can't, you either have to get LED's that disperse light at over 45 ° or get brighter wattage bulbs, but that creates heat.

Have used all the way from 2,000 mcd to 10,000 mcd. I like the blue tone (like artic blue colour), that was at 8,000mcd, but it was still too dark to make the display legible to read. The actual display material doesn't help either.

I think the white display material and LED's would be better, but I haven't done this yet. But I think I have to work on the way the light is dispersed with the LED's, workout someway to help it being subtle, but yet effective.