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Side Project 2: Interior & Instrument Panel LED’s

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The next side project I decided to tackle was to upgrade all the interior cabin lights and instrument panel bulbs to LED’s, so I started to purchase the various size and types of bulbs required, mainly from Alibaba.com. As I have said before, I am not particularly mechanically-minded and this lack of skill also extends to being somewhat limited in the electrical department, but  I was throwing myself into this project as a learning experience as much as for any other reason, so I started to fumble my way through it.

Firstly I replaced the existing dim interior cabin lights to super-bright LED’s, with only managing to blow a few fuses in the process. I purchased a couple of LED kits from Mark Redfern’s excellent Rabbitz2k shop on eBay (here) which duly arrived in the post, and with a minimum of fuss installed them into Digby.


Taking out the instrument panel and replacing the various warning light bulbs is not to be underestimated, it’s quite a complex job and I referred to the Mitsubishi Delica Owners Club UK forum (here) on more than one occasion. Reading through the forums I found out that I would need to purchase twenty or so T5 size bulbs, (depending on the upgrade options in the vehicle), and three T10 sized bulbs and take the dashboard surrounds apart to get the instrument panel out, which comes out as a single unit. Removal was a little more difficult than I expected and whilst it was a bit of a mission,  I  compounded it by shorting out at least two of the copper tracks on the back of the instrument panel in my ham-fisted attempt to replace the bulbs.  Bugger…!!



There was no way around it, I had damaged the copper tracks to the point where there were a couple of instrument bulbs that would never work again and therefore the only option I had was to replace the whole unit. Someone up above must have been smiling on me that day because luckily there was a good quality second-hand instrument panel available on eBay which would only set me back just under $150. This was becoming a pricey mistake, but luckily the cost of the instrument panel was offset by the fact that the LED bulbs were ridiculously cheap.  



After waiting a month for the replacement instrument panel to arrive, I 'extremely' carefully plugged in the various LED replacement bulbs and remounted the panel into the dashboard, and hey presto, everything worked as expected….

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Note: It has been noted in the MDOCUK Forums that LED’s need to be able to handle 16v, not 12v (here), otherwise the bulbs will start flashing randomly and then fail. I have noticed that a couple of my replacements have started exhibiting this exact behaviour. I guess I need to look out for some 9-16v LED’s…!

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