gonna swap my gauges to blue. their a 194 bulb right? sylvanias website said 161 and 194. if so wat one and how many do i need? thanks

 

Depends on the year of the truck, but in general the cluster lights will be T10 base bulbs.... 194's etc should all be similar in size.

There should be 6 bulbs.

While you have the dash apart, why not go led??

Feel free to check out my post HERE

Here's what my current cluster looks like with blue smt leds:

 

someone over on GE is doing custom LED work on clusters... Might wanna chekc that out.

 

so why did yers come out so clean i got 4 cluster leds red ones a 32 degree angle and they look like ****. its patchy and i can only see wear the light bulb is and maybe a half an inch around it.

 

If you replace only the bulbs, you will get hot spots. That is what your problem is. You need to solder in some more led's to fill in the spots with less light hitting them. Get some flexible led strips from superbrightleds.com and put those in, I just did mine.

 

If you didn't remove the cluster overlays & sand off the oem color filters, they will look like poo. OR if you're not using led's the same color as your overlays, ie blue led's with blue color filtering or green led's with green color filtering.

The red light from the led's has to go through the green or blue oem filtering which will greatly lessen the actual light that makes it through.

The 360* led's I'm using (see pic I posted before for results) are all the led's I have in my cluster, no extra led strips, no extra led's hidden.
I went through a lot of different types of led's before I found the ones I have now. I had planned on making a full circuit board with led's, but after I found these, I quickly dropped that idea.

 

Even with the 360 LEDs you have some bad bright spots, where the LEDs are, and dim spots (like where the odometer is) in your picture. This is a picture of the OEM cluster, with bulbs, and you can see how much more even the lighting is:

 

IIRC , taking some fine sandpaper and scuffing the smooth glaze off the LEDs will diffuse the light better to eliminate bright spots.

 

LEDs can't take much mechanical or thermal stress. The wirebonds will fracture easily.

I think Ford did a good job with the cluster lighting, nice and even, and you can see everything well. Why screw it up?

 

To change the color.

 

Nice!!

 

These are the stock bulbs? I wish my current dash would look like that.. half of them are burned out :-( I am going to do white leds since I like the contrast of different colors in your above... but if I am going to get hot spots I'm wondering if I should just get normal bulbs and call it a day since that would still be better than my half burned out dash now..

-Nigel

 

To do something awesome, like this?