[LostMy65]

Originally Posted by damnyankee36

I tried a few of the cheapy brands on eBay and wasn't all that happy. The bases and pins were just a few thousandths inch smaller in diameter and tended to cock and fall out of the socket. They also could be brighter but I have nothing to compare them to see if that's possible.

My biggest gripe was the LED assembly wasn't secure in the base and would twist very easily when installing them. If you were to take one apart you would see there are two uninsulated wires going from the LED to the base. There is a plastic divider but not much else to keep from damaging them if they were twisted too far.

I just got in some LEDs from superbrightleds.com and they are a much better quality. LED assembly is tight in the base. Color coded. 3 year warranty. Twice as expensive but in my mind, you get what you pay for.

I'm gonna check to see the difference in fit and brightness.

To dim them I used an LED dimmer, (pulse width modulator). I removed the circuit board from the enclosure and mounted it on the back of the cluster and mounted the potentiometer in place of the unused choke hole. Drilled out the knob hole so it would fit the pot shaft. The only problem in this method is that the dimmer ground input and outputs have to remain isolated from each other. Since the lamp socket housings are grounded, I had to replace them with two-wire sockets. PITA, but I had too much time into the project to go back!

Nice