Does anyone know if it's possible to change the color of the lighting in the gauges from the orangish color? I used to have a VW Jetta and I really miss those blue lights... Anyone cracked open the tach or speedo yet???


David
-V--V-

 

The gauges, interior controls and radio and clock displays are all lit with LEDs, orange ones. There are no simple white bulbs anymore. It IS possible to change out the LEDs, and a number of people have tried this, but LEDs present their own unique problems, especially when converting from red or orange to blue. Blue LEDs require more voltage (about 4-6 volts) than red, orange or green ones (2-4 volts on average). The 'form factor' of the LEDs is another matter, instead of being mounted on wire leads, they are 'surface mounted' to printed circuit boards. The sheer number of LEDs presents a little bit of a problem as well (about 10 in just the toggle bank alone) and the availability of blue LEDs in the same component outline is not just a trip to Radio Shack. In short, you have to take everything apart that is orange and spend some time with a soldering iron, solder and tweezers.

I have looked into this myself and found it not the easiest thing in the world to do, but not impossible. I got used to the orange LEDs after a while.

 

I think that it would be cool if only the needles in the spedometer were blue, there was a website that sells this for imports I saw a while ago, can't remember the name. Just a thought

 

Even if you could change the backlighting on the gauge faces to blue, it would still leave you with your orange dot matrix led arrays. These are produced in flat panel units. They cannot be modified. The leds and the board are one component. I looked into this to see if I could find a company that made matching orange led array displays for an electronic gauge monitoring computer I am thinking about building.

Orange and blue are cross complimentaries. I don't think they'd look all that good together. IMO.