DIY LED tail and brake light upgrades GS 750ES

[mikerophone]

Spent a little time upgrading my tail and added LED's to my turns signals for even more visibility. My turns are small aftermarket amber lenses which in my lovely state of Utah are not supposed to be illuminated full time unless they are red.

I figure if a cop wants to pull me over for being more visible, I'll fight the ticket...

I also didn't want to drill and holes or modify anything stock in the tail/brake light since I'm pretty close to stock, I wanted to keep everything removable if I ever care to do a resto on it.

For the turn "markers" I modified some extra LED's I had, the kind that normally go into a dome or door marker light with the caps on both ends, I believe they are referred to as "festoon":

I simply heated up the metal caps until the solder was liquid enough to remove the caps, soldered on some wires, and coated the connection with liquid electrical tape:

Fed them through the existing turn signal stalks:

Didn't even have to use anything to mount them, they fit right next to the 23W incandescent mini "winker" bulbs I still am using for my turns:

One day I'll upgrade the turns and turn signal relay to LED, I truly dislike the "Hyper Blink" that so many LED turns have, I want a relay where I can control the speed, granted fast is better than slow...

Here's how it looks with the lens on, a bit of a bluish yellow as opposed to orange but hey, it's all about separation and visibility to me:

 

[mikerophone]

On to the tail and brake light upgrades. I work in the printing/tradeshow industry and we sell light boxes we have made in China and a couple of them came in with a cracked piece of acrylic or bad frames so I took them apart and ended up with some nice 12V 6500K strips:

I needed to repair the lens and plastic weld (ghettofab) the lower right side mounting post anyway, so I took out the tail lens and assembly and cut the LED strips to fit, using 3M VHB (Very High Bond) double sided adhesive tape to attach them:

I did a strip and a half for the parking/running light:

and about the same for the brake light:

Once I wired them up, I decided I needed a bit more separation between the 2 rows since LED's are so directional, so I did part of each row as tail and the other part as brake, using some spare Cat 6 Ethernet cable I had laying around to wire them:

All on with the standard 1157, which conveniently had burnt out the brake filament:

With the lens on, parking light only:

Anyone who's ever tried to get good pics of LED lighting upgrades know how hard it can be since it changes the exposure so much. So here's a little video showing the LED markers I added to the turns, the parking/running light and my son applying the brakes:

Decided I wanted a little more red in there, and the upgraded LED parking/running light shed enough light on the plate through the clear lens so I put a red 1157 LED bulb that was way too directional for my car's tails in it:

I did have to modify it a bit, dremeling one of the pins off, shaving it down and grinding some of the round plastic domes on the Diods down to clear the lens, but it looks fine:

 

[mikerophone]

Video isn't working, here's the link to it.

 

[cougar]

well done , looks great.
always good to be seen.

 

[eil]

Very nice work. I'll have to look up those 12V LED strips on eBay, they look like a nice easy add-on to the dim stock brake light.

 

[posplayr]

I recently added bulbs to replace all my stock, 1156 and 1157 bulbs. After trying yellow, red and white LED's it turned out that the white bulbs were much brighter even through a colored lense than the LED closer matched to the lense color.

My tail light was a smaller bulb, but very bright that I used both 1157 elements of the brake bulb as my brake light. The rear white 1156 flashes are quite good as well in amber lenses, but the front 1157's are hard to see with my train light . I plan to double up both elements on the front and fore go the running light feature. A headlamp modulator should be more effective at that anyway.