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In the door on each side is a red reflector that for all the world looks like it was designed to light up. The light would help the person see the side of the car a bit better but mostly let on coming traffic know that the door was open.
Here's the final result - note that the door liner is sitting on my garage floor and that my car isn't lowered THAT much.
After pulling the door liner off I popped out the reflector lens and gathered my materials. I went with five red LED's from www.superbrightleds.com which were like $1.59 each. Since the lens is red the red LED will light up the brightest though the lens.
I used a bit of lexan I had laying around and cut it to fit just inside the rim of the red reflector. Nothing has to be too neat it just has to be smaller than the rim but bigger than the hole in the door. The resistors were $0.99 for five at Radio Shack.
I drilled five holes 5 mm in diameter - OK, a bit smaller than 5 mm and reamed them open with a hand reamer - and then dropped a drop of crazy glue and an LED into each hole. One lead of the LED is longer than the other - these all have to go to the same side as LED's are polarized - they work with electricity applied only in one direction. There is also a notch cut into the base of each LED and they too line up. Either way you'll get all the (+) leads to connect to the (-) leads end-to-end (like a line of batteries in a flash light).
I then soldiered the leads to each other in the daisy chain. I used the alligator clips from my volt meter as a heat sink and used a low wattaged soldier pencil for no more than two seconds per joint. LED's will melt if you get them too hot. The alligator clip goes between the intended location of the solider joint and the base of the LED.
The 150 ohm resistor was solidered to the (+) lead just to help me keep track of where the wires go later.
I put some heat shrink over the resistor and then used a drop of glue to hold it to the board. Later I used two very small plastic tie wraps to hold the resistor along side the soldiered leads. The LED's appear white but glow red under voltage.
The board sits inside the reflector and over the top of the door skin. As the two legs of the reflector grip the door they hold the LED board down in place trapped between the reflector and the door skin.
And finally a close up installed.
I'll run the wires from each door down though the center of the console to my diode steering circuit I built to light my foot well cold cathode tubes up as the doors open and close.
These were installed over a year ago and the LEDs in each door are still perfectly functional. The 150 ohm resistor drives the LEDs at a pretty good rate as they are nice and bright but are not over driven at all. Some of the replacement bulbs over drive the LEDs way hard and they'll burn out after as few as ten hours of use.
On Paul's scale of one to five Z's I rate this one a three as there's some small scale solidering going on and you've got to watch the polarity and the heat. Anyone with some solidering skills can knock these things out in 15 minutes each not including the time to run the wires afterwards.
---ZZZ ---
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Super Black 2005 35th Anniversary
Realy Great Job & writeup but was wondering if you could do pictures of the wire hookup at the switch, and also i thought that you had to wire the lights in parellel, not in series as you did , as per my front reflector lights install using some led from superbrightled.com also , although the led I bought already had the resisters built into the long leads of the led's and told to do in parallel or they would be dim ??..
...I guess I'm blessed...Mine light up--not quite as bright as yours--since I
bought my '04 Tour' Coupe in Feb. of this year! No feathering issues, either.
Stock machine (I'm 59), will remain stock; I bought it for the looks, reliability,
performance, ergonomics, thrills...DID I MENTION LOOKS, PERFORMANCE & THRILLS???!!!
Old-timer from the AST zone.
I like this mod because its so subtle, yet adds a little something that the Z is missing. Props. I'll be doing this soon at the same time I add LEDs to the three dots on my kickplates.
LED Door Reflectors
