LED lights

The lights on my beetle work fine! Nothing wrong with them, they are all working and bright. But, that doesn't mean I can't "fix" them.. :-)
When I discovered LED's, I knew I had to have them. They are long-lived, are bright instantly (usefull for brakelights) and they use a lot less energy. Especially that attracted me to LED's. I always drive with the lights on, night and day. That means, that the rear lights, the dashboard lights and the headlights are always on. Which will cost me gas. It may not be much, but I hate just wasting that when there is a way to fix it. So I started to convert the lights to LED's.

Taillight and Licenseplate light

I also own a motorcycle and because of that I tend to go through online motorcycle parts shops. There I found this:

You're looking at two LED chopper "tombstone" taillights and a LED license plate light. The taillighs where on sale for 12 euros a.p. That's a bargain!
The great thing about using these taillights is, they have are approved by euro standards (E-sign). So, the LED's have the right brightness and projection angle.
If I had build the taillight from scratch, I would have to determine what brightness to use (mcd value) and what projection angle would be enough. Because I don't want to guess when it comes to my taillights, I bought these motorcycle taillights (and they were cheap! :-) ).

After taken the taillights apart, I ended up with this:

The print plates are quite square and on the back there are 4 leds pointing upwards (in motorcylce setup) as a license plate light. I will mount it so that these are pointing outwards. So the taillight is also visible from the side.

In the above pictures I removed the black plastic holder that holds the print plate. When figuring out how to mount the LED's I discovered the fastest way was to use that black plastic holder.

I used to angled pieces of aluminum popriveted to the black plastic and screwed to the iron plate that holds the bulbs. Note that I pointed the license plate LEDs outwards.
I cut the motor cycle connectors and soldered on some normal spade type connectors.

It's important to put the LEDs close to the taillight lense. And with these elephant taillights it's important to position them in the square with the flat surface in the middle.

The arear in the blue square is flat, and the area to the left and righ to it has a ribbed profile. This profile is meant to break up the light of the normal bulb. This does not work with LEDs!

Licenseplate light

I also bought a motorcycle license plate light.

I took the housing off, and that left a nice small print plate with 4 LEDs in a row on it.

I removed the original bulb holder, and made a holder for the 4 LEDs from a small piece of thin aluminum. And I soldered the wires to the original wires that normally go to the bulb holder.

The 4 LED's are professionally held to the aluminum piece with a tie-wrap.. :-) . I put some duct-tape on the aluminum to make sure the print plate didn't short out.
In the picture I only screwed in the aluminum holder as a test, it is missing the plastic glass cover. Now that it is finished, I put the plastic glass back on.

And this is the result:

The left light is a LED light, the right light contains an old-fashion bulb. It looks like the bulb is brighter than the LED, but that isn't true. The LED light is more intense. It's difficult to make a realistic picture, as the camera is looking into the light. The bulb does light up the taillight better, that's because the bulb has a 180 degree projection angle, while the LED's are closer to the taillight glass and have a smaller projection angle (but big enough to be good visible from behind). Look at the standard Hella LED third brakelight, that one is brigther than a bulb taillight, but it doesn't show in the picture.
The license plate light is also very bright, it's brighter than original.

Dashboard lights

When you turn the lights on on your car, the dashboar light to iluminate the speedomoter, temp gauge, voltgauge and clock also switch on. The speedomoter has 2 bulbs, and the tempgauge, voltage gauge and clock have one each. These bulbs are 2 Watt bulbs, so that's 10 Watt. During the day this is a waste of energy. So I decided to replace them with LEDs also.
I believe there are LED raplacements for sale that you can just put in the place of the original bulbs, but they are quite expensive. At least, a lot more expensive that some LEDs and resitors and old bulbs...
So, I decided to make my own

I took a standard bulb, and broke the glass. Then I used a 4 mm drill to clean out the inside. You've got to be carefull with that, because there is black glass on the bottem (as an insulator) that you don't want to break!

On the underside I used a file to flatten the point. Then I used a very small 1 mm drill to drill through the center of the tin point. This must be done very carefully, otherwise the black glass that insulates to point form the bulb housing will break and fall apart! Leaving you with a useless bulb housing (maybe it could be fixed by using a sort of resin as a insultator?).

The bright white LEDs I bought had a smal projection angle. To improve the projection angle I sanded them with a fine grid sanding paper. This should diffuse the light more.

Left an un-touched LED, right the sanded one.

Now, most LEDs can't handle 12-14 volts directly. Usally they can take around 3 Volts. This means a resistor should be used to bring the voltage down.

I soldered the resistor to the plus side of the LED, not that that matters, but that's the only place where there is room. The resistor can be put inside the bulb housing and the minus side fo the LED is soldered to the side of the bulb housing. Pay attention to this, a LED has a plus and minus side. If you switch these around (ie plus side to the side of the bulb houding and the minus side to the bottem) the LED will not work! Als check when installing the finished LED light that the plus and minus are correctly connected to the bulb holder.

The result:

It's a little less bright then the original bulbs, but it is bright enough. I think sanding the LEDs down lowered brightness. It might be better to use LEDs with something like a 120 of 180 degree projection angle, but I am happy with this for now.

City lights

In the headlights (in european cars) there are two small 4 watt bulbs, below the low/high beam bulb. They are always on when the lights are switched on. They don't do much, but they have to be there because of safety inspection and you could use them when you park your car on a dark street.
I bought some 8 mm 1200 mcd (1.2 times a candle light) LEDs with 180 degree projection angle and soldered them (just like the ones above) to a empty bulb housing.

These LEDs have a totally different "bulb", because they have to project 180 degrees.

The left one is a original bulb, the right one is the LED. As you can see the LED is a lot more white. These LEDs are 3500K nm and called "warm light" LED, because they are a bit more "yellow" than standard LEDs. In the picture it looks like the left one is much brighter then the right. In reality they are both about the same brightness. It's very hard to take a representative picture when you're pointing the camera into the headlights.. This is only city lights, the halogen low beam ligths aren't on.

Energy Savings

OK, what's the energy saving compared to traditional bulbs?

Next to longlivity and fast light-up response, it saves me 28.25 Watts. It's almost half a headlight!

The next step is to install LED Daylight Driving lights, and that's what I did! See this page: LED Daylight Driving Lights.