Thread: LED turn signals

Tweet

I'm trying to convert my old 38 Chevy tail lights to LED. The lights I ordered are direct replacement tail lights. I can't get them to work. I have power to the light and when I hook my old light up it works. Now the LED's have a red wire, a black wire and a white wire. I am assuming the black is ground and red brake & turn white park. They didn't arrive with directions on how to hook them up. No matter how I hook them up they will not work. I can't see both new lights being bad? Any one worked with this type light? Someone told me I had to change flasher to a electronic one. I did that and still nothing. Thanks for you help!

There is not enough amperage draw on an LED light to activate a normal flasher unit. Ron Francis sells a special flasher unit that you will require to make it work. If you want to cheat and use an ordinary flasher you could probably run a parallel circuit to a hidden 1157A bulb which would draw enough load to activate a normal flasher unit. You would need one paralell circuit for each side of the car, but that seems like a lot of effort to get around using the proper flasher unit.

As stated on another post, you can add a regular bulb to load a thermal flasher, but a good electonic flasher may not need one.
There are 'dummy loads' sold to take the place of a hidden bulb.
I did all three things to my '37 and ended up doing something different anyways... Know why?
There are a lot of LED lights out there, but few are bright enough to work well woth 1930's glass lenses.
LED's are real directional (meaning they are bright if you are looking right down the barrell, but not very bright from an angle.
As I said, I had LED's in my truck and had the joy of following it during the day one time. You could hardly see the brake lights at all. They were worse than the original 6 volt bulbs.
I ended up leaving the LED's in the frone, where the clear lens glass didn't cut down the light emitted... Then I put halogen bulbs in the back and have been very happy since.
Perhaps some of those newer pizza style LED's would be better...

Some LED compariaon pic's are at:
http://community.webshots.com/album/54792831KPkAjw
Jeff

Thanks for the information. I found the problem. The White wire is Ground with this set of lights. Might help someone down the road to know that. The lights are the pancake type and a sealed unit that sits right out the back on the housing. Look pretty bright. Thanks again for your help!

we made our own for a 34 ford coupe and a 65 ford anglia

looks the dogs too

just a thought in future to spread the angle direction so it spreads an even beam of light for view behind

hey this is kinda off the subject of this post but i was wondering if you can use tail lights from other years on other pick ups for example i want to put like some 30's tail lights on my 76 because im gona relocate them in my bumper and shave them off the bed i was wondering if that would work like if the back up lights would work and the blinkers and stuff thanx

I've changed a few, used the bulb socket and soldered it in to the old housing so I could use 12V 1157 bulbs, sometimes I used trailer replacement sockets, also some sockets twist out like the 65 mustang ones I used < i used a drill, grind stones but the new unibit step bits work faster to drill out the holes . sand and flux the surface then solder it into place.