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1997 Blackbird dash cluster light replacement


XXitanium

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If it’s like the 99....

 

You may be able to access all 3 screws just by removing the windscreen, but you get more room to work by removing the front end plastics.  Take off mirrors and front cowling.  Three bolts to dismount cluster.  Easy peasey for the bulbs once it’s off the bike.

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Someone posted a photo of theirs with blue LEDs, looked pretty cool, something to consider.  I think the thread was about an LED or HID headlight, but not sure.

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Hello, to change the bulbs I only had to remove the dome, the side panels and of the four screws that hold the odometer I removed only the top two, with this you can push the odometer forward one inch and with that to spare to access the bulbs . I changed the big six but I did not put led, I put the same but more watts, the ones I had were 1.7 watts and I have put them 5 watts.

So it looks pretty good

 

 

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Just removing the top two screws gives you good access, removing the bottom screws takes more time and really doesn't need to.

 

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I think these are still the original ones, 20 years old !!

 

 

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These are the ones that I have put now.

 

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This is how my odometer looks now.

 

I am afraid to put them on LEDs because they heat up more and will surely have a shorter duration, although if the good quality purchases are possible that they heat up a little and last a long time, keep in mind that the odometer is always on (here in my country it is mandatory to carry always the light on, so I did not put them on led).

 

 

Edited by Hondero
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LED should run cooler, not hotter.  Lots of people use them for instrument panels and I've never heard of a temperature problem.

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Some larger LED have substantial heat dissipation. The little LED I think do not have heat problems.

 

Algunos LED más grandes tienen una disipación de calor considerable. El pequeño LED creo que no tiene problemas de calor.

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8 hours ago, XXitanium said:

I looked it up. There are some people applying heat sinks to LED 5W bulbs!

A 5W LED is gonna make a shit ton more light than 5W incandescent so it's an extremely unfair comparison.  Most of my house lights are 6W LED, and they run cooler than the 40 and 60W bulbs they replaced.  An LED instrument light is probably less than .5W.

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6 minutes ago, superhawk996 said:

A 5W LED is gonna make a shit ton more light than 5W incandescent so it's an extremely unfair comparison.  Most of my house lights are 6W LED, and they run cooler than the 40 and 60W bulbs they replaced.  An LED instrument light is probably less than .5W.

...agreed. most of mine at home are LED as well. They stand up to shock better too. 

 

I don't want to melt any of my kid's dash plastic....though it sounds like real-world experience *here* has proved it's not an issue.

 

I was just rambling on about the heat sinks. I've done industrial installations where the heat sink was about 25lbs of aluminum.

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8 hours ago, XXitanium said:

I saw a video of someone testing one of those lights with a power supply and it pulled around .15W at around 14v.  He was holding it for several seconds before dropping it saying that it was hot.  A 194 incandescent gets too hot to hold even at battery voltage.

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4 minutes ago, XXitanium said:

...agreed. most of mine at home are LED as well. They stand up to shock better too. 

 

I don't want to melt any of my kid's dash plastic....though it sounds like real-world experience *here* has proved it's not an issue.

 

I was just rambling on about the heat sinks. I've done industrial installations where the heat sink was about 25lbs of aluminum.

The only times I've compared their heat side by side is the house lights and the lights in my boat.  The LED replacements in both ran cooler.

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I have no idea what the W5W is, but no fucking way they're 5W, that's about half of LED headlight power.  The test some guy did indicates they're .015sh watts which seems about right.  From memory, the ceiling lights in my old motorhome were 8W incandescent and the LEDs were around .8W for about the same mount of light, the LEDs mighta been a little less light, super cheepos before good and cheap LEDs were so plentiful.

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4 minutes ago, XXitanium said:

?

They're typically used in clearance lights on trucks & trailers.  Grabbed one to wiggle it around, I was testing for a possible contact issue, it was pretty toasty.

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There's a ton of misunderstanding about LEDs here, propagated by shady sales tactics and uninformed sellers.  So I'll just give LED 101 here...

 

LEDs are oddly behaving compound semiconductors with a strict forward bias current and voltage.  A raw LED has to be fed with precisely controlled current.  Meaning that what we call a consumer-usable LED module is a control circuit plus an LED.  An LED is always MUCH cooler than a incandescent light of the same output.  The control circuit however adds heat/waste, and how much varies by its quality.  A good control circuit loses around 5-10% of the power to heat, a shitty one can easily be wasting as much as the LED itself.

 

For any given light output, the LED chip itself uses 1/9th the power, and generates even less heat fractionally.  But we have the control circuit, packaging, and possibly a filter chemical, so the normal actual real-word difference for household bulbs is that 9-10w = 60w.  Still fucking great.  For auto bulbs I've seen slightly better results except with truly shitty Chinese $1 crap.

 

There really aren't white LEDs.  Most are blue LEDs packaged with yellow phosphor, which is the direct complement of blue, therefore giving us pseudo white.  BUT!  It's not white like a normal bulb, or daylight.  Our eyes see it as white, but while light has the entire spectrum in it normally.  White LEDs have ONLY the spectral composition needed to make us perceive white.  This is why cheap white LEDs have a green cast to them, especially when looking straight at the LED, or holding bright white paper (93 or higher).  This all results in rules such as not using a filter.  If you put a red filter in front of a normal white LED, you get nearly nothing.  Filters don't convert light, they block out the spectral components that are not that color.  Well, there is nearly no red spectrum in a typical white LED.  Some white LEDs are actually just packaged RGB (three LEDs), but that's more expensive and can cause odd refractions.  Also you still shouldn't use them with a color lens.  They produce three specific colors only, not a spectrum, and a lens would block two of the three.

 

It's hard to imagine any situation where a similar brightness of LED could be hotter than a normal bulb.  I'd like to say "impossible" but I've only studied LEDs a little bit.  Most people, however, go for more light and could possibly have a heat issue then.  

 

Heat is the killer of LEDs.  They will last "forever" if you could remove all the heat.  There's always a heat sink/life tradeoff.

 

For a colored lens, use the same-color LED.  Nearly all of its energy will pass.  Not only are LEDs brighter, a bulb loses all of the non-matching energy, while the LED will pass most of the energy through the filter.

 

Specifically on those Anourney bulbs with W5W, who knows what the Chinese type out.  They sure don't.  If those were 5w they'd be as bright as a household 40-50w.  More likely they are 5w equivalent, which as a total guess, seems reasonable for dash bulbs.

 

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1 hour ago, SwampNut said:

 

  If those were 5w they'd be as bright as a household 40-50w.  More likely they are 5w equivalent, which as a total guess, seems reasonable for dash bulbs.

 

 

Agreed, I think LED bulbs are sized as equivalent to incandescent in brightness, based on the ones I have used. They will use far less power. 

 

Back to the question, looks like Hondero installed 5W incandescent bulbs in the dash, up from the 1.7W they replaced. They will burn hotter and may melt something. Recommend to go with the 5W equivalent LED. That's what I did 3+ years ago, no issues. Found them at Wallmart of all places.

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