wow just saw these posts....
FYR we definitely should meet up sometime. I am far west valley in Surprise, where abouts are you?
As far as the customization I've already started it and will copy my posts from another forum here but to address the comment above. I do plan on keeping this truck for an eternity and like the others have said good luck in finding replacement parts.
The main reason I wanted to start this project is because I have multiple bulbs burned out. If I'm ripping thing apart why not customize it a little bit and get rid of the yellow lighting everywhere?
Anyways here is my post about the process so far. Granted I've done a lot to vehicles over the years but this is a first for me...
Ok gents here we go. LED's came in today....well now yesterday ugh. I've been working on this for probably about 7 hours so far.
Some issues here and there, definitely not as easy as I thought and may be in a little over my head with all this.
So here's some pics of whats done so far. The colors are much darker in person, dark blue and dark red.
Driver Door controls:
Passenger seat heater controls:
Steering wheel buttons:
Headlight, rear washer controls:
Now here is the circuit board from the radio. I didn't mind ripping it all apart because I needed to replace 2 buttons with white showing through that were there when I bought the truck:
As you can see there are a total of 17 bulbs including the 2 inside the dials on the left (which I have no clue how I will access those.) The LED's I'm using to replace the bulbs are rated for 12-14 volts so they should just be a direct replacement. However I now have 9 of the bulbs swapped to LED. On everything else I did one bulb at a time, for the radio I figured I'd do a row at a time since there are so many. Everything was going great until I hit the 9th bulb. Soldered in the LED and now that LED and 2 from the top row will not light. These circuit boards have contacts on both sides so the back and the contacts under each LED have to be resoldered which I've been doing. I just don't get it.
Now I don't know whether to scrap the idea and rush a bulk order of the old school bulbs and just change everything back or keep trying to figure this out.
Oh and now my two steering wheel controls on the top are doing crazy things to the radio-I don't know if its because the radio is torn apart or what so now that has me worried. I mean to potentially have to replace a full set of wheel controls and a radio we're talking a few hundred bucks....
God I wish the wife would talk me out of these projects from time to time lol......any thoughts at all? I can't recall seeing anyone venture this far into this type of project on any of the boards.
Also the pic of the radio board was before I started swapping the LED's in.
Just to make a point. I don't believe anyone on the 4 boards I follow has gone this far into an LED swap that I know of so yes there will be complications and issues are why these boards are around for fellow enthusiasts to help others. I appreciate the concerns Smith but we all customize our vehicles, some more than others.