Toymods Car Club Inc: Tech & Conversions => EL luminous instrument cluster kits

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Darcangel
Occasional Poster

Location:
VIC
Registered:
November 2003

Re: EL luminous instrument cluster kits	Mon, 28 June 2004 14:29

Sorry took me a while to reply guys, been a busy week! Ok, will post pics hopefully in the next few days, went to take some the other day and dead batteries grrrrr..... Basically, if you want to make your own, this is how I did mine - it might sound a lil shoddy, but believe me, the number of people who see them and go woooooooooooowwwww those must've cost you a bit and the fact you can be proud of something u did yourself, makes it worthwile IMHO Ok, take your dash out, take your guages out and run each guage through a scanner (bear in mind you will want at least a semi decent printer and scanner). You can then change the colours of the guage faces or add any designs etc, change the fonts if you want to - whatever! I wanted white dials, so I just used microsoft photo editor (which comes with MS Office, but most basic graphics software has this feature) and hit 'invert colours'. Makes a standard black dial nice and white! Ok so you then print these out and get yourself a sharp scalpel or something - most newsagents or arts suppliers have them. You cut out your holes for screws and needles and for any lights which show through like fuel warning or door warning lights etc. Now what you need to get yourself is the stuff that actually makes them glow. It's called EL FOIL, you can do a search on ebay and find the guy I bought mine from (he's got auctions on now I believe) or you can head to www.cooltronix.com and buy them from his website. I think it cost me 15 bux a sheet and I needed about 4 sheets. Use a permanent marker (with a fine tip) or something similar and use your existing guage faces as stencils to mark any holes you need to cut on the EL FOIL and cut them out to shape. They come with power supplies (inverters actually) and pins that allow you to wire them up. Now what the inverters do is take your 12v DC from your battery and bumps it up to about 80v AC which the FOIL needs, you can use the crappy ones they send or for about $12US buy one from www.speedhut.com in the US - this one is more efficient and has a dimmer switch as well as allowing you to switch between green or blue. So once you have all that, use a multimeter or electrical probe to find a 12v + feed that comes on when ur headlights are on, this will be one of the wires that feeds into your dash. Ground the other wire and you're all set! The white dials look all sporty during the day and the whole dial lights up bright blue at night. Now those who are looking for just the numbers/markers lighting up, that's harder because you need to use black cardboard or something that blocks out most of the light from the foil and only lets it through the think slits you cut into it where your markers and numbers are. Hope this helps guys, will post pics shortly! Darcangel [Report message to a moderator]

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