Well, I was bored this morning, and being inspired by Mouse's post, I decided to try and get my gauges to become a nice blue colour, and decided to do a how-to on it.
Ahhhhhh... the joys of being bored with nothing to do and crappy weather outside...

Anyways... I'll assume that you can get the gauge cluster off, if not, just do a search.
Once the gauge cluster is off, remove the bulbs "condoms" (I really can't think of a better word for them), and pull out the stock bulbs. They're really hard to work loose, but I've found that holding the base of the condom with a pair of plyers and rocking the bulb pretty hard gets them out relatively quiclky (Allright... now you get your mind outa the gutter and leave it be!)

So here's what my gauges used to look like:

Now, using the LED's from Oznium, along with the resistors that they also sell, cut off all but a little bit of the lead on one side of the resistor

Cut off all but a little bit of the positive lead on the LED, and solder the resistor onto it.

Now, in order to get the LED's to work with the condoms, I've found that the following shape works the best in order to get good, consistent contacts. One thing as well, you might want to wrap some electrical tape around the wire in between the resistor and the LED. I was testing one LED once I got it into the condom, and the lead got folded over until it was touching the wire between the resistor and the LED... so bye-bye LED. :(

Oh yeah... for testing I used a 9 volt battery that I've taped wires to the + and - leads... makes a really handy tester!

Now it's just to fit the bulbs into the condoms. One thing I did to make the testing easier was put a + on one side of the condom, where the connections are made. It'll cut down the testing time by about half... :) Here's what the LED now looks like

Now installing the bulbs is easy, though it does involve a bit of trial and error. As LED's require the correct polarity to work, you have to play with them to see how the polarity is arranged in the cluster. I should have written it down, but I didn't think of it at the time. Don't worry about putting them in the wrong way, because it won't hurt them. But here's a side-by-side comparison of the old bulbs (speedometer), and the LED's (Tach).

The LEDs look way better IMO, though they do put out a very concentrated beam of light directly above them, so you can see exactly where the bulbs are in the cluster. Oh well... here's the finished product

And finally, the Dr. J gauges by day (I know that some people have been asking for pics...)

So there we are everyone! If you have any questions, feel free to PM me!

Good job boarder! (edit: boarder was changed from "skiboarder" ;))

To add to this, if you want to evenly spread out the light coming from the LED's, consider using a diffuser for them. I put some of these LED's in my car as "neons" and to diffuse the beam, I took a small piece of aquarium tubing 1/4" diameter i believe and 3/4" long and filled it with hot glue (which is a little cloudy when it dries, we want this). What this does is it dims the direct straight-outward beam and refelects some light sideways (snell's law of physics if you are wondering) just like a lightbulb. I planned on using these the change the gauge cluster bulbs to LED's but never got to it....you can also experiment with other stuff. I have thought about using those clear plastic BIC pens (hexagonal shape), but once again, haven't had too much time for experimenting. If you use the pens, you would probably have to scuff the sides with very course sandpaper to more evenly distribute the light. Goodluck! and PM me if you have any questions...

Thanks for the compliments man! But it's just boarder... not skiboarder! :)
I'll probably give it a try with the tubes a little later. Right now I realized that I probably should have soldered the leads onto the connectors of the condom, which I think I'll probably get around to on Sunday... because a couple of the LED's flicker out when my subs are thumping. I'll post a couple shots of the re-done LED's/condoms Sunday or Monday....

Thanks for the compliments and ideas!

haha my bad, where did I get the ski from i wonder lol...

yeah solder would probably fix the flicker...keep up the good work :thumbsup:

Looks bunnyin sick Scott, nice freakin work, and if you have the chance, see what it would look like with a diff coloured LED back there (perhaps Red :D )

Blue looks sooo good. I tries red too on mine looks good.I like the blue better. If you snip the wires at the bottom of the "condom" the bulbs pretty much fall out. Nice work! :thumbsup:

they also make different types of leds, some that shoot the light straight out and also some that shoot it out the sides, they look like they have a square around the led, another solution to the bright spots you got but seriously it looks really good, I want to do that to my needles. I think I saw that they had the housings at kragen but i wasnt sure, give it a try and see if it would work. great job.

Three things to add here... first off, I tried soldering the leads to the condom's connectors, but for some reason, I was unable to get the solder to stick to the condom's connectors... I really don't know much about soldering, but I was wondering if anyone might know why!

Secondly, I re-made some of the bulbs so that they had longer leads to them... thus allowing to position them better, and remove some of the concentrated light pathways.

Finally, here's the polarity of the respective sockets on my 99 Alero's cluster.

From the pics, the olds logo is harder to see. Any idea yet what your going to use to spread the light better?

Hey what size resistor are you using there? I cant make out the color scheme enough to tell.

Thx.

Clan

that is so bunnyin nice man...good work, and a very helpfull how-to as well

it'll gimme sumthin to think about when my gauges get here

i did this a looooong time ago. i suggest using 3-5 led's instead of one. and point them in different directions. helps give an even light rather than one really bright part. and i just bought 100 of them off ebay for like 5 bucks and they worked AWESOME. and i wired mine differently....i did mine the same way indiglows would work(tapping into the light switch on the vent). rather than using the stock cluster power. i think that allowed me more room for led's rather than bending the wire in wierd shapes and also allowed me to skip having to deal with the polarity of the stock housing.

also when you cut the lead that short on your led you MUST be fast and careful. or at least you should if you paid a bunch of money on led's. if you spend too long soldering you will toast the led. you should also use the clip on heatsinks to help with that.

Hey Scott, would you be willing to help me out, or do a cluster for me with LED's?