anyone replaced their dash lights with LEDs?

I am planning on replacing my dash lights with LED lights, I have looked around www.superbrightleds.com but I am really confused. What LED's will be drop in replacements, will I need to add a resistor?



Has anyone done this? How has it worked out? Any tips or information I should consider??

If your bike has the wedge base type bulb, a 168/194 drop in replacement would work lowering the electrical load on the system. To find out, you're going to have to gain access to the bulb holders/sockets and remove some light bulbs. Some of the older Kawasaki's used the bulb sockets that required a twisting motion to remove the bulbs; the wedge base type just pushes into the socket.

Looking at the website,I'd suggest getting the type that has one LED as I don't think anything larger will fit through the openings. They look kind of pricey but will last a long time resisting vibration better than the stock bulbs will.

I have replaced some of these bulbs before and to remove them it required twisting.

www.z1enterprises.com/detail.aspx?ID=1935

I believe these were the replacement bulbs I used.

I've used those in my cars before. All of them have internal resistors to work on 12 volts (unlike raw LEDs that run on 2-4 volts), but external balancing resistors will need to be used on any bulb that is part of the turn signal circuit. The polarity has to be correct or they won't light up. Not a problem on the twist-in or wedge base bulbs, but threaded and bayonet (push-twist) bulbs could pose a problem if the socket is wired backwards. Make sure that the bulbs you get have a wide angle or your edge-lit gauges will be very dim. If you use them in your warning lights, they will tend to have a hot spot in the center of the lens and it could affect the flasher circuit in the stop lamp indicator.

I replaced the bulbs in my ZRX guages with LEDs when a couple burnt out.

The instrument panel glow is a bit different but much nicer now. Plus, if you want to, you can get the coloured ones for your instruments to match the paint on your bike (e.g green, red, blue, etc).

The only issues I had with them was putting a couple of them in the wrong way. I had the press in type and thought that I had checked them all ok before remounting the guages but found out that my high beam LED was not working. Took it all apart again, flipped it around, and problem solved.

In general LEDs are fine for indicating lights, but not so great when providing ilumination.

Have a '91 Zephyr 750 and attemped to change instruments to LED. In my case used all #74 bulbs, with a 5 mm base. I used the highest intensity could find. With LEDs you have to chose bulb same color as lense.

With Oil, Neutral, and Hi Beam, indicators had no trouble.

The Zephyr has a single directional orange indicator, and is wired between right and left circuits. So here LED would not work, as LED are unidirectional. Polarity has to be same always.. I had to solder diodes in the harness to correct this.

Hi intensity clear LEDs in the tach and speedo did not provide good ilumination. So went back to stock incandescent. Problem here is that light has to be radiated in all directions and LEDs are not good at that. I might still try different, more radial, type.

Anything that is controlled by a switch, such as a parking light, brake light, or some dash indicators (oil, neutral, and high beam) shouldn't need a balancing resistor. Any light that flashes with the turn signal or is controlled by an electronic circuit (stop lamp indicator) will probably need the resistor.

I used to work with LED's in the electronics industry. Like Hugo says, you have to use the correct color of LED to match the lens of a warning light. All LED's except white ones are monochromatic, which means that a colored lens will not change the color much. Putting a red LED under a blue lens or vice versa will give practically no light. The only LED's that can be used with any color of lens are "warm white" LED's, which are very close to incandescent bulbs in color. Regular "cool white" LED's are bluish and will make red lenses light up dimmer and pinkish.

Some LED's are very sensitive to reverse voltage, especially those that are blue, purple, white, and blue-green, and can be destroyed if you lose a rectifier diode. Soldering a small diode in series with the LED will help protect it.

instead od a resister, Superbrite has some electronic flashers that do not care what the load is. they are about 9 bucks. If you do the turns, you will need to replace the emergency flasher too.

The question here is about only changing instrument to LEDs. I believe resistors are refered 'as needed' when changing the stock DIRECTIONAL BULBS to LEDs.

Actually, in this case, is better to simply change the mechanical flashing relays to electronic ones, as resistors emulate and waste energy (read heat) as the original incandescent bulbs.