LED Switchback Turn Signal

O.k. So the idea behind this is you have a dual purpose bulb. I wanted some brighter attention getting running lights as well as just a nice bright turn signal.


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You can see on the bulb itself it actually has two arrays of LEDs. The yellow ones are bright white. The orange ones are the amber. I picked up both the LED and socket base from superbrightleds.com $20 for the bulb and $2-3 for the socket. The effect is pretty awesome.

On with the install.


First things first is to pull the turn signal itself out. You need to do a slight modification to the housing so it fits the tabs on the socket. You can see where I marked off the area, with sharpie, that needs trimmed.



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Like so.


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This is the three wire socket, they are only a couple bucks.


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I also popped this out. Since the bulb itself is now amber I don't need the amber reflector in there.


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Next we need to start wiring. Since the original bulb is turn signal only, you need to pull a constant power for the white light part from another running light. Since there's one right in the corner lens housing, you can pull from the red wire there.


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I just stripped a bit of the shielding back and bridged right onto it there, vs cutting the original wire and then having to solder all three leads together.


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Slapped it with my good friend, liquid tape.


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And then wrapped with silicone tape.


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You can see I also covered the wire itself with some woven loom. All the better to protect your wiring job.


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Next it's just a matter of tying into your original turn signal wires. For these white will be your white LEDs. Blue will go to the ambers. So wire accordingly. In this case white to the new line I pulled from the old running light and blue into the original turn signal which for the lft side here looked to be green with a yellow stripe I believe. Don't quote me on that though.


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Button It all back up and here is the result. The flash is fast because I still need to install a corrected relay for LEDs. That's a simple $15 fix though.


As always, if I missed something or you have any questions, feel free to let me know and I'll gladly amend my post or follow up as needed.

Comments

  • Private video? :miserable: Nice write up though.
  • Sorry about that. Forgot that youtube wants to set everything to private at first. Should be fixed now.
  • DRMORTYDRMORTY Council Member
    Pretty cool.. and good write up.
  • jongsrjongsr Wagonist
    Nice, been wanting to do this for a while.
  • Yeah it's super simple. The proper relay should be in tomorrow. I'll plug it in, take some pics and that should correct the fast flash. If it does I'll get part numbers.

    It's quite nice that they sell the proper wired sockets, that makes this a breeze. I've seen other people do them and snag sockets off of an acura or something that had a similar setup, but unless you already have that in your parts bin, just makes sense to buy the sockets for $2 a pop.

    If I happen to ever build my pressure chamber for the molds, one of the things I'm going to cast is the amber inserts for these. They have some fresnel lens properties to them which helps get more light out there. But that's a long ways away probably =D
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