The other day I was thinking about what I wanted to do with my bezel and all my gauges. A fairly good idea popped into my head(well at least i think its good). Ive been reading up on how make your own halo rings for your headlights out of acrylic rod. If you buy a sheet of acrylic(which is extremely cheap) you could cut out the exact shape of your normal needle and mount an led into the base. And I would imagine this would look exactly like halo headlights, but your needle would have the same effect. I'll send Windows Paint drawn diagram if you want

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Sorry about all the attachments and pictures. My computer was freaking out.

 

That would look cool if you could get a small enough Led and connect the wires in a way that they wouldn't effect the motion of the needle.

 

ru talkin about using a halo to light up each circular guage? Something like this?:



those are compltely custom LED guages (those are mine), haha their pretty infamous here on HCF, god damn just wait til Addiction gets on here, he's gonna have a hayday.....

 

No I think he's saying that acrylic material would be illuminated by the LED (just like in a halo made of similar material) the same way the needle would. Look at his drawing that he made.

 

if you mean to replace the needle on your speedometer i would advise against that, ive heard that even painting the needle causes it to be off.

 

Yeah, especially if you attached a wire to it. Those things are run by really tiny magnetic coils, and there not very strong. The factory needles are very very light and flimsy.

 

ya you cannt lite up the needles unfortunatly


ive wanted to do that so bad BUT no way to do it without alot of surgery and still MOST LIKELY the gauges wont be that accurate afterwards

but my infamous led cluster at least brightens up the face alot beter... and i leave the upper 2 outter bulbs inplace and lite to help light up the whites of the needles... ive tried some UV leds BUT they dont make a difference SO i just kept the stock bulbs...

 

There was a kit a while back that had new caps for the centers of the needles and you'd then cut off the old needle and glue on colored acrylic needles and then mount a UV cold cathode in the upper flood lights but the company that made them went under. The only way I found to do glowing needles is using UV clear coat paint, took a few coats and my needles glow a pure blue (with uv cold cathodes mounted in the upper front spot light possitions).

The uv wash you see is from the carbonfiber bezel overlay reflecting the uv light into the cellphone. In all reallity the bezel actually glows from the uv as well and I personally find it to be pretty cool ( but addiction doesn't like it as much).

Either way the idea is sound but being unable to removed the needles makes the idea near impossible...... I'd say IF you try it to have a spare cluster on hand to work on so if it fails you're not out your only cluster.

 

dito.........

i dont realy care for the coating....

BUT if ya wanna try definatly buy another cluster to experiment with...
typicaly ebay has them for about 50bucks shiped....
i just bought another cluster for myself for about 50bucks...