To make it short....

I ordered sport trac gauges and blue 194 leds. Took me 3 hrs to install the gauges onto my cluster 2 days ago. This morning the blue leds came in. and the best part...

I just spent 5 freaking hours taking everything out...scrapped the green off my new gauges...installed the blue leds...and it looked like total CRAP! The blue from the leds did not flow evenly at all and all you could see were 6 blue dots...with nothing else lit up.

So I take everything out after failing to come up with a good solution...tried alot of different crap. Anyways, so im $120 in the hole. I knew I should have left the sport trac gauges as they were....they look awesome even in green. I am so angry right now!!!

but yea, gonna order a new set tonight of sport trac gauges..until then i have yellow gauges..yuck!

 

You should have installed a white bulb and dyed the back of the guages blue... Just my $0.02

 

tried it...still looked crappy. i just ordered the new set, but im still mad at myself for doing something when i had a weird feeling something wouldn't be so great.

i forgot one other detail...the only reason why i wanted blue gauges was so it would match my blue stereo...and wouldn't you know...the blue leds were a different blue...that being said i dont have time to mess around with paint or die trying to match my stereo

...starting to calm down a little now...lol..but still mad!

 

did you sand the ends of the LEDs to disperse the light?

 

i could try that...but like i said...it was too much of a difference in color compared to my blue stereo

im too picky..everything has to line up just right and match perfectly

 

That sucks. Those gauges look good, but they should've been blue in the first place.

 

I've said this many times, on many dash LED posts over time: LED's usually have too narrow a cone of light for dash illumination without modification.

Look at my Cardomain site in some of the LED tutorials for information on making LED's spread out more.

 

mmm hotspots are always nice

 

Only when they have live bands....

 

You should have installed INVERTED CONE Led's. These distribute the light EVENLY, and I had to do the same thing you just did to find out!

 

i did! i have 194 LED 10mm Blue wedge Inverted side lights, and they dont work good enough!

On a side note...

Anyone want to buy the sport trac cluster...pre scraped...and 10 blue LEd's?

 

D might be interested in your LEDs

 

yes!! pm me!

 

I was playing around with my spare blue led's i bought and turns out it fits in my glove box...so now i have a blue glove box when i open it...pretty sweet if you ask me

 

sweet.. when did rangers get glove-box lights? mine didnt have one..

 

are you sure? almost every car i've ever seen has them...maybe yours is burnt out...go check and see

 

i sold it lol.. my vdub has one tho! I do remember checking EVERYWHERE up there, even undid the glovebox door and took the airbag out, nothing.. maybe they just skipped the Gen 4's or something

 

Yeah, my 2005 has no glove-box light. Kills me to turn on the over-head light just to pull out a piece of paper I was looking for.

 

Presumably it was removed to save the company money...what ever happened to improving cars instead of trying to slowly eat away at them?

 

Sorry to hear about the blue LED's looking like crap in your ST cluster.

When I went shopping for a new HU years back, I was very picky about what it lighted up like rather then brand. I knew my interior lighting was green, and I didn't want anything flashy or that would stick out. I had gone with the Pioneer DEH-P3500 head unit. Like you, I'm pretty picky about the details. Everything needs to match and blend together.

 

I don't want the cluster, just the overlays you scraped, lol. But PM me a price for the cluster if a previous poster doesn't want it.

 

offroad ranger already beat you to them! sorry!

 

Wert, sorry to hear that the LED's didn't work for ya. That stinks man. On the other hand, at least you got rid of the cluster that you bought so that's not so bad.

At least you know now and will be able to install the other cluster in like 15 minutes! lol

 

That is true, I've become a master at disassembling the dash in the past few days

 

You have your MDA - Masters degree in Dash Assemblies