LED tail lights

LED tail lights

Ok, so I'm really digging LED tail lenses lately, but of course unless you drive a scion, mini-cooper, or some luxery automobile your out of luck. Well, I've got these slightly cracked altezzas lying around (got rear ended about 6 months ago and they installed my originals back in), and I thought "hmm... drill holes in a circular pattern (5mm) around the bulb hole from behind, fill the bulb holes.. wire up each ring of LED lights, add resistors to drop down the voltage so they don't burn out, maybe even snap off some bulbs so I can sorta do a makeshift plug, and plug them into the stock harnesses, and I've got myself LED lenses. I'm busy with other stuff at the moment, but I'm gonna start working on it in a few weeks probably. You can buy altezza as cheap as $60, and LED's run about 10-20 cents a piece, so it wouldn't be a terribly expensive project. Like I said, I'm going to practice on my broken lenses first in case I fuck up, I won't really care.

Can't wait till you are done with those tails. I was thinking about doing and LED on a 98-02 tails, but never got around doing so. A person over at 9th gen corolla did a LED tail just similar to the one you are planning on working right. Here is the link

http://9thgencorolla.com/forums/vie...der=asc&start=0

selling chrome altezzas let me no if interested

Ok...my bad...I may get things like that wrong when I'm in a hurry to reply to something (i.e. me calling the Prelude an "Acura Prelude" a while back)...but you know what I meant.

There are LED bulbs you can buy that will fit the stock harness. Don't waste your money reinventing the wheel... They're all over eBay. Plus I've heard of another kind where you stick into the housing, and then it folds open to form three arms with lights.

LED bulbs suck. They aren't as bright as the halogen bulbs. If you really want LED's, then you need to do something like he did and throw in more than 8 or 10 little LED's.

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He is making LED tails not headlights right? Halogen bulbs are used for headlights, <i>Incandescent</i> bulbs are used for tail lights.

Yeah I knew what you meant sometimes if feels good to point out other peoples mistakes...makes up for the many mistakes i make.

yes, rear tail-lights.. and I want to do it with altezza because I think it will show up better, but that's basically what I want to do.. though he did it in a very stock looking pattern so it looks like it's just a regular bulb reflecting off a textured lens (I'm sure in person you can tell it's LED), but I'm thinking of making a circular pattern of LED's (perhaps keeping the bulbs and just using LED to enhance). Saw these on a nissan maxima tonight that did both. I don't want to just buy LED lamps because it's just a small hole, I want it to be a fairly large pattern. I think someone on here was attempting this at one point (actually wiring an array on a board), but not sure how they were planning on opening up the lens (I couldn't open it without cracking it). I spose if I don't like how it looks by drilling holes, I can just cut out the whole backing out and try to make an array (I'd have to create some sort of reflective covering to hide the board).

what about a heat gun does that work to get the lenses apart I wonder?

heat gun didn't work, started to melt the plastic. this guy suggests sticking it into the oven real quick (and has a pretty nice page showing some custom LED lamps)
http://www.ledcar.com

Another forum I read
http://forums.linear1.org/index.php/topic,618.0.html
says don't use white LED's because they're actually blue led's with a filter (which means you lose light). The best thing to do (and that page shows them) is the luxeon lights. they're guaranteed for 100k hours, or about 15 years (so you'd never have to replace them). they're a bit more expensive than LED's, but it sounds like a harsh envoirnment would make the LED's dim.

It would be much easier to just buy a stuffed board and just have two wires coming off of it:


Maybe just create a thin sheet out of lexan and drill holes to match, then spray it with chrome paint (so all you see is lights popping through).

I think manufacturers do this purposely sometimes so they can include it when the freshen the car in 2 or 3 years. If you notice, the initial release of a new model may have red/orange tails and by the end of the model's lifespan, it ends up with red/clear tails or LED ones. When said model is redesigned, it often often comes with red/orange tails again so the manufacturer can "freshen" it and bolster sales volume in a couple years.

nice links...looks like a have some more reading to do

I wouldn't be surprised if LED headlights started to show up at some point. Cops use LEDs in their light bars and those fuckers are rediculously bright! They'll light up the entire street and seem a lot brighter than the older types of strobes that cops used. Anyway, I'm sure the technology will make its way into headlights at some point.

actually I've been doing a bunch of research on lighting lately. I visit amish country 2-3 times a year and I'm gonna develop a solar/fluorescent bulb system for them. Here's the breakdown:

reference:
standard 40 watt lightbulb is about 400 lumens

incadescent lighting (old fashioned resistor lightbulb developed by edison 20 lumens per watt

LED's (luxeon being brighter, but about the same efficiency
40 lumens per watt

cathode lighting (scanners and copiers use these, you might also see these in case mods)
80 lumens per watt

fluorescent lighting (long tubes you see in supermarkets, you see a lot of lightbulb replacements lately that look like a corkscrew)
100 lumens per watt

Now obviously you wouldn't want to use a fragile fluorescent bulb in anything automotive, but cathode aint bad (see the trunk my cardomain page). although cathode is just as fragile, they're very sturdy when encased in plastic.

I just tried sticking my altezza in a 400 degree oven for 5 minutes and it still didn't come apart (and it seems to have warped when I tried pulling it off). I'm thinking maybe aftermarket parts have even more strigent rules to go by from DOT so they seal with a higher degree adhesive to prevent leaks? I might try to find some cheap stock lenses on ebay and see if they come apart easier, maybe even try the aftermarket clear bulbs


worse comes to worse I'll simply snap off the clear plastic in pieces and replace it with lexan (get the basic shape, use a heat gun to wrap around the bend, router the excess off). It'd be neat if I could also stick a a toyota logo decal on the inside and lightly sandblast it, so that the light is difused a little, but the logo shows up clear. Started thinking today about not even using pre-existing lenses, but rather create them from scratch (seems silly to use a thick lens housing for something that only needs to be maybe 1/2" thick). If I bend a couple pieces of lexan around the existing shape, space them apart with some thicker lexan stock or just hot glue. Only thing I'd worry about is getting the screw holes lined up (or maybe I would just double side tape them on since it's much lighter than a stock lens?)

I am sure that you are right. First concepts then production

http://www.thecarconnection.com/ima...MMYGHXNATFP.jpg

Infiniti G35 Coupe Concept



Infiniti showed in Detroit the successor to the G35 sport coupe, the Coupe Concept. The car is the predecessor of the new version of the G35 and its Nissan sibling, the 350Z, both of which are at the midpoint of their life cycles. The coupes were brought on the market in 2003 and are up for replacement in 2008.


The Coupe Concept is in fact an evolution of the G35, but the handsome car does not need many changes to carry it into the next era. It has large LED headlights and rear lights with a specially treated surface. The exterior includes a full-length glass panel roof and a more pronounced shoulder line, emphasized by bare-metal-look paint. The taillights received a special sunglass-style multi-layered surface treatment.

The door handles are hidden and compact cameras replace the traditional rearview mirrors; their images are projected on flip-up screens on each side of the instrument cluster. The concept car is equipped with 25/35 R20 rubber up front and 275/35 R20 in the rear.

In the interior Infiniti combines a performance-oriented cockpit with a luxury atmosphere. A long full-length center console houses the leather/aluminium shifter knob and other controls, including Infiniti's Human Machine Interface controller, similar to that on the Infiniti M and FX. The steering wheel has paddle shifters and control buttons. The interior incorporates special textures like aluminum accents in the style of traditional Japanese washi paper. The concept car was designed at the Nissan Technical Center in Atsugi, Japan.-Henny Hemmes

I just saw the new rav4, and although the tailights look cooler (array pattern), they're STILL using lamps. you would think any new redesign would use LED's by now? I mean, LED's are like the same cost if not cheaper (especially if you look at the longevity aspect), and a company like toyota that thrives on reliability you would think they'd be jumping on this.

a heat gun is the best way to remove your lenses , youre gonna have to sweep the heat continuously across one side of the lens for about 5 minutes , but dont get too close or hold in one spot too long , it will burn.

they already make led taillights for the 03 corolla check these out
http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/e...Y_BIN_Stores_IT

that's great if you have a late model corolla.. I'd be curious what those look like lit up. are they a small section or do they fill the whole lens?

btw, I got the lens off my altezza (by force) but the lens is ruined (which I don't care). I heated it up, heated it up.. wouldn't come off. finally I said f*ck it.. I heated it until I could see it melting and I curled it off like it was taffy. Still took me nearly a half hour to do that. My curiosity of how they managed to secure it so well drove me to get it all off. Not only was there some sort of very hard adhesive (probably the kind that's rated to 800 degrees), plus on one side the bottom panel it's curled over like a thick piece of aluminum. To put it shortly, the $40 altezzas I bought off ebay were probably mass produced in china and were not meant to be repaired whatsoever. I think at this point I'm just going to keep my eye on ebay and look for stock lenses to see if toyota does in fact use removable adhesive.

Ok.. I got a used &quot;official stock&quot; toyota tail light and basically it wouldn't come apart with a heat gun either. took a diamond wheel dremel to the side and grinded it until I cut through.. there doesn't seem to be any adhesive used, but rather they somehow use heat to literally merge the plastics together. I think for the moment I'm going to give up on this project until I can do a little more research. It seems futile at this point.