tail lights

well, i won a pair of tail lights and surrounds in what looks to be very good condition of EScam for the low low price of $180

(i guess no one else was watching?)

now, im thinking about making some LED tail lights, within the standard housings, so i get the life and brightness of LED's but the origional classic styling of the best car ever.

So, i was thinking about the fume issue in the rear of the zed, and i thought, What if i recessed the lights slightly? creating a gap around the edges?

And then i ducted air from the wheel arches into the back of the tail lights?

i guess the thinking is that if i can get more air into the back of the tailgate area, it should do a lot to "blow out" the recirculating vortex of exhaust fumes.

Thoughts??

Vortex issue I highly doubt would work with what you just described.

I'd pay more attention to sealing up the cabin rather than letting more potential fumes & road noise in...

Congrats on the purchase though, sounds like you did better than me.

I was bidding on a 280ZX Turbo EFi manifold tonight, but I was sniped with 15 seconds to go & was outbid by a measly $2...

now, im thinking about making some LED tail lights, within the standard housings, so i get the life and brightness of LED's but the origional classic styling of the best car ever.

You can get these globes from Bright Light Auto Parts http://www.brightlightautoparts.com/ - the pictured one is 54 LEDs, I have 36 LED white ones in the rear indicators of my Alfa, and they are BRIGHT.  Especially compared to the dull point of light which was only just visible in the centre of the lens, now when the indicators are on the whole lens lights up right to the edges of the reflector.  I believe stop/tail replacements are also available.

If you are going to use them as indicators, you need to change your flasher can - in the Alfa I could pull it apart, and change the capacitor inside to slow the flash rate down.  Not sure what would be required in a zed - although if zeds use 3 pin flasher cans, I have one sitting on my desk for use with LED indicators, didn't fit an Alfa fusebox (typical!)

Wow nice link Zeddophile, cheers for that! 

Nice, i have been meaning to do something about making my front indicators more visable & improve the dash lights.  I always liked the idea of leds in the original tail lights looks stock till u jump on the anchors. 

Q - for auto elecs - 'Mayhem' - if I swap, front indicator, all rear globes & guage globes what might this do to my 37yr old wiring, kll/fry it & would a solution be to put in 1-2 realys.  Any thoughts appreciated.

Dale

LED's will not fry your wiring. the whole car set up on led's will use less power than a single globe. leds use at most around 10mA unless you going to use the Luxstar ones which is more around 50mA.but LuxeonStar ones are lot more difficult to adapt. need heatsink as they get quite hot and die.

i have done my custom guages with led backlight have over 100 leds for all guages. and they can all run at once. lot of leds. and no frying 

the issue with timing with indicators is the resistance value. poorly designed led replacements will cause indicators to flash due to impedance differences. hence the need for changing the timing capacitor in flasher unit. good indicator replacement leds no need to change this.

also the stop lamps should have a slight timing delay to stop the erratic flashing when brakes are applied due to brake switch bouncing. this is not an issue with globes as they take time to warm up and light up.

led's have quick turn on time. so a switch debounce would be good for led replacement lamps. again good quality ones have this allready inbuild. ive seen few cheap conversions and when brakes applied the leds flash erratic. this probably good as it more annoying and more visible.but it does look like something is not right.

check Jaycar electronics for replacemnts. read the description to verify that they have impedance matching for indicators and switch debounce for the brakes. all other lights the cheap replacements will be ok.

also i think Autobarn and some other good auto places had good ones for sale. but they are $$$$$$$$

dont worry, i'll be sealing up the hatch anyway. i have a few ideas for that bit too.

but the idea was that by adding more air to the back low pressure zone, it'd make it not so low pressure.

Once i do the LED lights, i can seal them up, and seal it all along the rear panel anyway.

i'll be gutting the lights, because i want the 'new' LED look inside the old lights, so the multiple points of light spread out along the lense.

yea, i know what Autobarn has, i work there, and its not so $$$$ for me

as for the flasher can, Narva make a LED specific 3 pin unit, that fits most applications, but not Alfa's

i'll post some pictures eventually once i begin on it.

I am currently building a new motor, and tidying up the bay at the moment.

Pics will come, once i have some actual progress to report on.

hey rbz...how did you do your back-lighting of your guages ? did you still use the same casings or did you upgrade those pathetic little bulbs with Leds....Im ready to throw my guages off a cliff at the moment 

I'm using LED's from http://www.ledshoponline.com in the tail, reverse & parking lamps in my DR30, the incandescent globes were brighter in the reversing lamps, and the white LED's do look a little 'blue', but the reduced heat & current draw is a massive plus - especially for old wiring!

I will need to do slightly more complicated wiring for the indicators, as in the R30, all body 'timing' functions are performed from an '80's version of a BCU - which I will of course need to bypass.

Any fully electronic flasher can should be ok for the indicators, but the LED shop does sell LED-compatible ones if you're not 100% sure about what you've got.

I plan on changing over all possible lamps in the Z - which will mean that the poor melted green diffusers in the gauges will have some long overdue support in the form of coloured LED's!

It does cost a fair few $$ compared to incandescent globes, but in the long run I don't plan on re-wiring the Z again...

LED's will not fry your wiring. the whole car set up on led's will use less power than a single globe. leds use at most around 10mA unless you going to use the Luxstar ones which is more around 50mA.but LuxeonStar ones are lot more difficult to adapt. need heatsink as they get quite hot and die.

 

i have done my custom guages with led backlight have over 100 leds for all guages. and they can all run at once. lot of leds. and no frying 

 

the issue with timing with indicators is the resistance value. poorly designed led replacements will cause indicators to flash due to impedance differences. hence the need for changing the timing capacitor in flasher unit. good indicator replacement leds no need to change this.

 

also the stop lamps should have a slight timing delay to stop the erratic flashing when brakes are applied due to brake switch bouncing. this is not an issue with globes as they take time to warm up and light up.

 

led's have quick turn on time. so a switch debounce would be good for led replacement lamps. again good quality ones have this allready inbuild. ive seen few cheap conversions and when brakes applied the leds flash erratic. this probably good as it more annoying and more visible.but it does look like something is not right.

 

check Jaycar electronics for replacemnts. read the description to verify that they have impedance matching for indicators and switch debounce for the brakes. all other lights the cheap replacements will be ok.

 

also i think Autobarn and some other good auto places had good ones for sale. but they are $$$$$$$$

what he said lol..

hey rbz...how did you do your back-lighting of your guages ? did you still use the same casings or did you upgrade those pathetic little bulbs with Leds....Im ready to throw my guages off a cliff at the moment 

check my galery images for the gauges.

only bit i used from the z were the housings and the metal bit was modified a fair bit.

i used surface mount leds which are 1mmx 1.5mm (very small) with wide angle which are soldered on a backplane board which accomodates the rest of the working bits of the guages. to make things more complex ive added two more colours witch are selectable via a switch. 3 basic colours gives 7 overall colours( ie more than one colour on at one time) hence my previous comment lots of leds.

problem with replacing the backlight in original housings is that viewing angle of leds. most are very narrow and to the point. ie similar to a laser but not as sharp and powerfull.

for that reason you cannot use a single led but need a cluster of leds in various angles. similar to the pic above in this post to light up the whole guage.

jaycar has this flexible strip of smd leds which could be lined around the housing and should give fairly good light output. but they are expensive from memory strip of 10 white leds were around $20 mark and you probably need at least 2 to 3 strips just for the speedo and the rpm. other you may be lucky with one strip. havent checked lately to see what they have and what the price is just visit www.jaycar.com.au in optoelectronics section

Ive started something similar to this so i can give you some ideas or some short cuts.

The best way and the cheapest way i thought was to

1. Take the lights apart, clean and get some colour coded plastic and fit it to the inside of the lenses and drill lots of holes in it for the leds

2. Make sure you buy wide angle leds, i got mine of ebay america and they came with free resisters cheap too

3. I then arildited them into place

4. Wire them all up and then coat with liquid electrical tape i think its called

5. The stop tail lights cause a small problem leds only have one level of intensity i bought these of ebay to fix that

http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&sspagename=STRK%3AMEWNX%3AIT&viewitem=&item=160272686698

Video link to the first test (beware i drop the f-bomb casue i was excited  )

Any questions nizm0zed just ask

haha love the commentary. language warning on it though 

 

now, im thinking about making some LED tail lights, within the standard housings, so i get the life and brightness of LED's but the origional classic styling of the best car ever.

 

Looks great man. You should do a night shoot and compare your old light setup to the new one. I mentioned what you guys were doing at the qld club meeting and they just looked at me strangely and commented that the old bulbs worked fine. I still think its a sweet idea and would love to have my tail lights with LEDs.

yeah i might take me a while, months sorry, to get it all sorted but i will post back when its done

it's actually not a completely daft idea although for a different reason to what he's thinking. basically the main wake of the car is much too big to be significantly affected by the small volume of air - you might measure the difference on a high end race car but you'd never notice it in normal road use. the more significant effect is that generally the wheel wells (front and rear) are over pressurised at the rear by the rotating wheel, this causes air to spill out of the wheel well and generally make a mess. venting the wheel well in a controlled design prevents this and is an important feature on most closed wheel type race cars http://www.fourtitude.com/news/uploads/Motorsport_News/new_dtm.jpg (excepting categories where it's banned in some way) and high end road cars. as with most of these things though you need some fairly decent speed to notice the difference - aerodynamics is very much secondary to mechanical considerations until you get above 100km/h.

As for LED's i have been shaving the top of them since i first got them. just cut the top lense part off and then the light isnt in one direction. worked wonders for all the dashes i have made.

We dont know but they are expensive from memory strip of 10 white leds were around $20 mark and you probably need at least 2 to 3 strips just for the speedo and the rpm. other you may be lucky with one strip.

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LED Flashlight