Winner of all:

50 SMT LED's in my domelight....





It lights up the ground near the side of the cab, I can see all the puddles with the doors open.



This last pic is an old one that I gave to another Ranger-Forums member



My camera dosent really do it justice... Bright is an understatement. At 5AM I turned it on (to grab a CD out of my glovebox) cruising to work on the 94 in Chicago and the guy next to me swerved in his lane lol.

 

holy bright inside... wow. pretty sweet man

 

bastard right before i get all my leds in the mail someone beats me out of the gate. How much did the supplies run you and if you dont mind telling where did get your supplies and how did you "wire" it, PCB i am assuming, but resistor setup and all that jazz.

 

It was a piece of cake, all you need is the following:

Quantity 2 - 25 SMT LED arrays (buy them on eGay, or autolumination.com) Price = 25$ each
Quantity 2 - Spade circle connector thingies you can buy from radioshack
Quantity 2 - Heatshrink wrap you can buy from radioshack
1 foot or so extension wire so you can reach the factory connections.
Hot Glue to put everything together.

Oh yeah, i used "quantity 1" Van Halen CD (1984) for my listening pleasure while working with tools in my livingroom

First you have to take apart a stock domelight and take out the connectors, I used the little loop guys and screwed them in to make the connection instead of those dumb ford ones. To give the domelight a raise up I cut the back of a CD case out and raised it up by hot glueing it in.

I used my dremel to cut and trim everything I needed too. I used a blank cd case to get some plastic material. Look at the pictures it will make sense to you.





You DO NOT NEED RESISTORS! - LED's draw like NO current. Even with the 2 arrays in parallel it dosent draw nothing compared to the dingy stock incandescent light. Your factory wiring will stay cool as a cucumber, even with all of this wiring in my domelight I still have my alarm hooked up to it so that when my doors open, my domelight turns on therefore triggering my alarm off.

Resistors are used when you do your tail light blinkers so that they pull more current, NOT A DOME Light! LOL

 

PS all... My EVO has a much sicker LED domelight and maplight setup... I will update with pictures soon, I have the same 50 in my domelight of the evo, plus 45 more in the maplight (3 individual lights) near the rear view mirror.

I have been doing these for a while now so I am pretty damn good at it I think lol.

 

Get rid of the LED's and get a HID in there.

 

LOL, should I mount the ballasts on the roof?

 

lol......you gotta have resistors, but i assume they are built into the panels, right?

 

I cant remember honestly, but on the other Domelights I have done (without resistors for sure) there were no problems, current draw was very low. The resistance of the setup was in the megaohm range. Remember, current is drawn, not pushed.

 

you don't need resistors if you hook the lights up in series..

1.5V X 8 = what?

 

Now you can be the light beacon for an emergency landing plane.

 

1.21 Jigowatts!!!!!

 

i had a feeling that was gonna be brought up some time soon.....turns out its here. lol.


I still gotta get off my lazy bum and get to moddin' that stang dome light....55000mcd 5mm leds.....20 or so in the dome and 20 in the ohc......hellls yea.

 

This is how the same Mod looks in my Evo, but since I have a maplight in my Evo i fit an additoinal 45 LED's in that, so its even brighter. In the domelight I did the exact same mod as the Ranger.

 

LED's don't have resistance -- they have a voltage drop which is constant. This causes them to attempt to draw very high current when hooked up and they self-destruct.

Some new LED's and arrays have built-in "drivers" or current sources which regulate the current to prevent self-immolation, lol. That's what your LED's have.

You can't measure the resistance of an LED array -- your meter is lying to you, lol.

They probably draw more than you think, but so much less than incandescents and their conversion efficiency is very high. Most of the energy they consume is radiated as visible light.

If you don't believe me, take a regular LED and hook it to 12 volts and hold it between your fingers. It might last a bit but will get very, very hot before it blows.

Edit: Got lost in the technical and forgot to say NICE JOB! I like them a lot.

 

one of my first mods to my truck was i got a light the same size a the ones as the liscens plate lights that was blue and used it instead of the factory one. so i now have a pimping blue light as my dome light. hell yea.

 

Wrong. That's 12 volts and auto electrics are 13.2 to almost 15 volts. They won't last if you do that and if your battery gets even a little low they won't light at all.

 

i don't exactly get what you did with the Cd-case?

 

well i was just saying..

i know the output is 12-15volts on most cars/trucks.

 

The factory dome light has a low spot to leave clearance when the factory dome bulb gets hot. I made that part of it flat by cutting up a cd case and using the clear plastic as a bridge across the low spot. I hot glued it together. For the Evo I bought some tupperware from Kmart and cut it up. Tupperware plastic is easier to use than CD case plastic because its more plyable and it wont really crack. Either way hot-glue was my best friend.

 

AAHHH That's why you don't need resistors because you bought pre-assembled arrays, that have the resistors already built into the circuit. i see now, i couldn't see the pictures when i looked at this at work, i thought you built an array and then you would need loose leds and resistors to solder to a PCB which is what i am doing, much cheaper too, the one i am building to mod my OHC for both map lights cost me $16 for everything(leds, resistors, 22g wire, and PCB).

 

i'm also assuming you put a switch in there somewhere so you can have it on with the doors closed?

 

Its hooked up to the stock wires. It works the same as before, just brighter!. The stock switch also controls this one just like the original. All I did was modify it to be 50 LED.