Gang,
Can't recall if I posted this here, but thought a potentially redundant post wouldn't hurt. Some of you may know I have a '66 Starfire and '66 98 convertible. Mechanically (trim excepted) they're pretty similar.

One thing they have in common is tons of light bulbs of different shape, sizes, pinouts and wattages. Somewhere along the line I figured I needed to get better an inventory, so I've taken to creating art boxes with similar parts so I just need to look 1 place before deciding to do a run to Napa Auto parts.

Here's a quick shot of my light bulb box:

Artists store guage, watercolors and brushes. We store light bulbs. If you can organize, you know what inventory you have on hand.

It's saved me a few hours or useless auto parts store runs over past 5 or 8 years.

I have a little thing about lighting. I don't like LED's in the dash of the old cars, so I one too of my way to organize the wattages (lumens) of the bulbs that fit into my gauge binnacles such that I could do a little low rent lighting design. The box contributes to that:


For me, at least bright for warnings, slightly dimmer for background lighting.

I keep a copy of the factory designations in my box just so I don't go too far afield from what GM inteneded. With lights they can get too hot and melt irreplaceable plastic lenses or melt insulation and cause a short. This kind of keeps me coloring within the lines:


Use factory reference to reduce the chances of overloading your old electrical system with hot bulbs or high wattages.

I have a similar box for my quadrajet parts. Same idea - tons of little parts, easily lost, but easily found if kept organized in 1 place.

Cheers
Chris

 

Chris,
You have displayed an excellent organizational idea for storing bulbs. You posted at a perfect time for me. I'm not being confrontational or argumentative, but can you elaborate the reason you prefer not installing LED's in the dash. I'm getting ready to replace my conventional bulbs with LED's throughout my instrument panel and I don't need avoidable headaches......

Thank you.

 

TWB,
I've been testing LEDs in my house for 20 years. I converted ~100 MR16 halogens to Soraa LED bulbs as a test. I hated the 2005 Soraa's hot white color so much I ripped out all of 'em & went back to halogens in < 3 months. Home LED bulbs have come a very, very long way. At the house, I'm back into testing "dim to warm LED bulbs" again 20 years later.

Cars are a different animal. I'm colorblind, but weirdly sensitive to the hot white light that most LED's throw off. My color blindness affects only my perception of some reds & greens (not traffic lights). Part of my dash opposition to LED's is purely aesthetic. Along the way I took a little time to really "design" the output wattage of the gauge background vs. idiot light bulbs & am happy with a traditional approach. If they someone makes "warm" car LED peanut lights I just don't know about, I'd love to hear about them.

Dash warm-color LED light experience Oldsmobile-gang? Maybe we need a thread on LED vs. Tungsten bulbs with pictures...

After 40 years with 2 '66 big Olds cars, when I grab Oldsmobile keys, I'm expecting the warm yellow tungsten glow in my dash. Not hot white LED illumination. If you like modern color & intensity, by all means go for it. It's just not for me (yet).

Technically LED's are better. No doubt: they need less input voltage (safer), throw off less heat (safer again), brighter light (safe x3) & all that. I'm just sensitive to the white color. Rationalizing, as I age, my eyes are getting worse, if I can see more of the world around the car because the dash is dimmer, that's safer for me & everyone around me.

I suspect LED's are great in brake, turn signal, reverse & turning lights, but I have not thoroughly tested LED bulbs for lights that I don't have to look at while driving. I have the impression there are some signaling (switch) adjustments you have to make if you change over LED bulbs. I speak with very little experience here. I just haven't been really impressed enough to run the test yet.

Joe P. is using some LEDs on his '60's cars. He is unquestionably an authority on points like this. My brake/turn lights are 2357 extra-bright tungsten traditional bulbs. They're bright, but live shorter lives. I can live with that. My reverse bulbs are similarly extra-bright shorter-lived XX56's.

As I understand it, LED dimming is different from traditional bulbs. Dimming with tungsten bulbs is a linear "you drop the voltage with a rheostat, and they're less bright". That's a geeky way of saying you turn 'em down & they dim in a way that makes sense to a 61 year old like me. LEDs are different. I believe they're triggered by binary chips. Binary controllers can emulate linear patterns, but if the chips or software is manufactured on the cheap, linear emulation may suck for a bunch of reasons. I'm no electrical engineer, and will happily stand corrected on any of these points.

With LED's, as I understand it (a deeply ignorant layman) they use chips & software to turn themselves on & off at very high speed to achieve a dimming effect theoretically imperceptible to the human eye. But if the manufacturers (uh, generally offshore...) cheap out on the dimming chips or software, the on/off cycle is visible to the human eye. That flickering is what drove me to mothball ~100 2005 LED bulbs and go back to halogens in my home. That flickering can induce headaches in some people, but to be fair I've never heard about it happening in cars. In my office at the time I got a headache or two. Quick enough that I ripped out the my home office LEDs in <3 weeks, if I recall correctly.

In cars, dash light dimming raises the question of how to dim dash lights with an analog (wound wire) rheostat in the light switch that predates the invention of LED bulbs by more than 50 years. I don't have the answer to that. Someone may have engineered something great. I just haven't heard about it. I don't like the LED dash bulb colors I've seen anyway, so I'm just not chasing it.

It sounds like you're considering a worthy experiment which we can all learn from. Go for it.

If they have multiple colors, go nuts! Combine Red, Blue, Yellow, White, whatever they've got. Design something fun & custom. Wouldn't it be cool if your COLD light was blue, HOT light was red, and so on? Have fun color coding as if you were a GM engineer all those years ago. In those days they used colored plastic lenses to achieve color coding. Now you may be able to do it with colored bulbs. Better? - Sure, if you like it.

The LED bulbs shouldn't be too many $. If it were me, I'd label installation location & store the old bulbs in something like the box above so I could stick 'em back in the car easily if I didn't like the LED approach. After a year or so, if you like the LEDs, donate the old bulbs to another car owner or your favorite landfill. Or give 'em away at a car show/swap meet.

If I were to go at it as an open minded new comer with interest, I'd start with LED exterior light bulbs & see if they outperformed traditional. I believe LEDs will be brighter, so, safer. If that's a winner, I'd move on to interior lights & see how I liked 'em looking at them every time I drove the car. Could well be you'll like the modern approach better. Why not try it?

Thoughts from a colorblind guy with fond memories of a 1910 technology arguably invented by Thomas Edison. Test & kindly report back to all of us here.

Cheers
Chris