aemeijers wrote:

On 1/26/2011 8:38 PM, Pete C. wrote:

aemeijers wrote:

Anybody know a source for T1 1/4 wire base bulbs (NOT LEDs) with blue
tint? Trying to replace the lights on the HVAC controls for a 2005
Caravan. Dealer claims they are unserviceable, and wants to sell me a
whole new pod for hundreds of dollars. I have already replaced them with
T1's (too small) after buying T1 3/4 that were too big (I feel like
Goldilocks), but the T1s are too short, and the blue condoms make them
too dim. I am aware of McMaster-Carr and Allied- that is where I wasted
my money on the first two tries, for the condoms and bulbs respectively.
Allied has clear bulbs in the right size (now that dummy me figured out
what the size is), but not the tinted ones.

And yes, I already tried rec.autos.tech.

--
aem sends...

When I got tired of burned out lamps in the CD/radio in my Chevy truck,
I replaced them with T1 white LEDs from DigiKey (and dropping
resistors). They worked perfectly, and even dim evenly with the normal
instrument dimmer control.

http://wpnet.us/guts.jpg
http://wpnet.us/closeup.jpg
http://wpnet.us/display.jpg

Yeah, I know, and that is what all the gearheads on the Dodge truck/van
forums said to do. But I am soldering-challenged, and haven't seen my
fine-point Weller in at least a decade. I'm sure it is SOMEPLACE here,
but....
The swap I did, and what I wanna do again with the correct parts, is
straight mechanical work, and totally reversible if I take the lazy way
out and find a real U-pick junkyard (none near here with anything newer
than 2000), and harvest some bulbs from shiny wrecks. I have no
convenient way to heat the board to tell which side of the hole in the
PC board is + and -, and no convenient way to solder to the trace and
get a good connection. These push-and-turn PC bases that the wire tails
wrap around are about 3 layers deep inside the mother. It took me about
3 tries to find a T9 torx bit to even open it up. In the Gen IV mopar
minis like mine, there are about 6 different variants of the HVAC
control pod. The documentation the parts guy had only applies to the
fancy version, with hard-mounted bulbs. 3 different dealers told me the
lights were not serviceable. I opened up the also-dark headlight switch
panel, and found holes for similar lights, but no lights and no feed
traces, and empty holes in the connector block. !#$%^& Chrysler had
'decontented' the vans by 05, to save a couple bucks here and there.

rant mode off

I know I have wasted way too much time and money on this already, but
'engineering' like this, done by bean counters, just ****es me off.

Do you have a non-soldering-challenged friend or coworker who can do the
work for beer and pizza? It's only perhaps an hour job at most.