LED tail lights

  • Butter
    Butter
    Senior Member
    • 1519

    #16
    Fixed.
    It's super simple. Just cut the interior side of the tail light out so you can rip out all the guts. You can get the board from Frys or Radio Shack maybe. Cut it to shape. Each LED has to have a dropping resistor, or else they will fry. You can see the center ground wire on the left, with the red TAIL and BRAKE circuit wires. For the brake lights, I just stripped a long section of solid wire, and ran it along the outer edge in a loop to supply power for those LED's. Basically a hundred parallel circuits. The center area is for the tail lights. It looks more complex than it really is. Everything is soldered and then encapsulated in hot glue.

    Use red LED's, or else you will get orange tails.
    You can use current regulating diodes and run several LED's off of it, instead of resistors for each one. They cost more though. Usually when you buy the LED's on Ebay, they come with the resistors for free, so I just used those. For testing, you can use an old AC adapter for something that outputs 12v-14.5V DC.

    Make sure you take care of any water leaks in the lights first. Mine leaked and killed a bunch of LED's.
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