66 dart LED prototype working for now

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I just finished redoing the inner boards and soldered them up for a test. Looks like I have it nailed this time.
with the lenses hot glued to the housing (no bezels on yet) the alignment looks goooooooood! I did put back in the little clear reflector piece (only 3 so far) since I moved the led's over enough to use them.
full brakes with flash, forgot to turn it off
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tails with the flash
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tails without the flash
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they'll stay in brake mode all night to check out if they'll overheat
it's 75 degrees here and the lights are showing 78 degrees on the digital
I'll check tomorrow afternoon to see how much it climbed in about 16 hours full running of brakes and tails.
 
Hemirunner said:
Excellent thread and excellent work. What did you use to cast the lenses? Most resins that I've worked with degrade with UV exposure.
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I used a marine grade resin originally and it SUCKED(read it as EXPENSIVE stuff that takes days to cure)but the last set I did I used Crystal Clear® 220 by smooth-on not as expensive and seems to work as wellor better by having a lot shorter curing time and I think 8900 tensile strength. it also has UV inhibitors in them . I cast some for my friend in his 65 plymouth B body and it's been going for 4 years now and still looking good. since I have the molds for the lenses only for the 66 dart (going to refine the shape a little bit better and re-mold the lenses and bezels together in red) since it'll cost me darn near a grand to re-chrome the bezels I thought I'd take my time and cast both the bezel and lense together for a solid red unit that I can just bolt on to the housing. I still have to join the 2 pieces per lense and cast them, then fill and sand any pits, paint it until it's mirror smooth and THEN cast the complete unit. My cores/original units have bombshell type pitting/craters in them so it'll take some time.

heck you'd think as cheap as chrysler was that the left inner and Right outer would be the same and the oposite way too, but NOOOOOOO they had to put a darn crease in the trunk and make it hard. I have to make 4 seperate molds because they are all different, not much but enough that you can't cheat by making one side and copying it to the other. same way for the led board 4 different ones there too.

since I have a lot more time than money right now I just putz around and "git r done" slowly
 
I've used the Smooth-on resins before and I liked them. I'll have to look into this for my 70RR's.
 
I've been busy with a bunch of other stuff but since I was working on the trunks area and making it look spiffy I decided to clean up my rat's nest of wiring back in the trunk area. I hand wired in each trunk section of leds and wanted a cleaner look then what I had , plus it make's ,y led setup darn near plug and play (yeah I still had to splice into the turn signals) but now it's just 2 splices and 1 plugin

there's the whole thing now all 4 light are turn tails and stop. even if I did nothing else but put the bulbs back in I'd still have this modification. white wire's a ground if you want it. soldered and heat shrink tubing so it doesn't short.
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stretched out and waiting to be put in

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there's my mod you splice the 2 wires into your turn (brown to brown and green to green) remove the tail light harness and take off the grey connector put it on the bare male terminal in pic and plug it in. DONE. dang whay didn't ma mopar do this? It makes the back of the car look so much better,

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74DartSwinger360 said:
What type of loom/wrap did you use on the wiring?
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got it off Ebay
http://www.ebay.com/itm/260997664438?ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1497.l2649
1/4 plastic weave it goes down to 12/8 and up to 3/8 . tightens up like the finger tube thingy(can't remember good that far back) I had as a kid. ya know the one your dumb enough to stick 1 finger from each hand into and someone ALWAYS has to pull your hands apart, then it's a bear to get it off because you've been dumb enough to stick your finger's in until they touched so you can't push it open and you have to twist em out. then you go and beat that kids butt for doing that to you.
 
74DartSwinger360 said:
Oh okay I get ya thanks for the link. Chinese finger cuffs or somethin like that.
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yeah thanks for the name,like I said it was a long time ago. it works good but I've discovered that I need to get the 3|1 shrink tubing instead of the 2|1 shrink.. can't get it around the wrap to shrink the ends but 3|1 will do that and give me a finished edge.


now to find some non insulated bullet terminals (male and female) for another project I'm working on for the dart
 
74DartSwinger360 said:
Best bet is to find cars with them and start hackin them off. I dont know where you could get them new though.
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I was thinking about that but I decided to hit the flea markets (scored about 40 male and 22 female, she'll have more next week for me) and see if I could buy some of the trailer terminals and dissolve the rubber using something that attacks rubber but not metal. I only need 24 or so but was unable to locate a supplier of the NON insulated male AND female bullet connectors that the trailer connector plugs use. I want to mold custom setups and help a friend out doing his early 60's something and up 4 door lincoln convertible stuff.
 
I'd be interested in a set if you decide to sell them eventually. I could build my own but you have already done most of the R&D so let me know. Did you use a trailer led and how hard is it to seperate the LEDs? I've never done it before but I assume once you figure it out its fairly straight forward. Looks way cool man nice work.
 
slantsixdan said:
Did you try Terminal Supply? They can get almost any kind of terminal, even if it's not in their cattledog.
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I did look in their catalog and couldn't find any that were the right size.

I'll email them with the sizes that I need and send em a sample if needed. I really want to get this part going for a friend of mine. I source parts and make the molds, he does the work and I get a little money per sale! that works for me!
I'm still refining the leds for power regulation so that they will last a looooong time. so far I'm moving 2 sharp 12v low dropout regulators into each board, it's an added cost BUT it'll make it almost plug and play without any housing modifications.
thanks for your help Dan.
 
gtmopar said:
I'd be interested in a set if you decide to sell them eventually. I could build my own but you have already done most of the R&D so let me know. Did you use a trailer led and how hard is it to seperate the LEDs? I've never done it before but I assume once you figure it out its fairly straight forward. Looks way cool man nice work.
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if it's the car that the hood came from in your signature "65 dart" then 66 leds won't work. 65 has the backup light in one of the lenses. I don't have any housings and lenses to test out how I'd do it but it looks like I'd have to go to SMD leds to be able to get the light output correct and safe.

Nnope didn't use Trailer leds they are to widely spaced to give me the lumen or candela (sp) that I need to have a safe set of led's in my car. (oh and the wife's dart too!) believe me I tried a bunch of them (wasted some money trying to get anything to fit and look good.) finally I brought the housings to A truck stop that sold ton's of stuff "light,leds and chrome"
we went through every light and the owner was kind enough(and interested enough) to even order in some special ones that might fit.
nothing came close to fitting and looking good. all in all we looked at 43 round led's and 18 oval or rectangular led.
 
I so love this set up ad thanks of sharing on how you made them
 
I finally scored a useable left outer bezel so I can now cast some molds of the bezels and do them in red acrylic. :cheers:

since I just started cutting the paint on the car I decided to see what the lights looked like on a painted car instead of primer.
they look GOOOOOOD! I still have to cast the bezels and do final tweaks ti the shape of (filling in pit's and scratches in the bezel) before I can get a finished product but I'm getting closer!View attachment 0124131909.jpg

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I also have a set of 66 lights that I'm going to use. They just look way too bad ***!
 
gtmopar said:
I also have a set of 66 lights that I'm going to use. They just look way too bad ***!
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thanks,. I wanted to test em real time. so I put them on a 66 from a guy at the car show and took it for a drive with me following..DAMN! looked gooooooooood. I want to video it realtime next time I see the guy since he wants a set made for his car now! it'll take a weekend to fiddly with the shapes to make them fit correctly in each bucket. then after the shapes are made and populated with led lights and tested it'll take 45 minutes to hook everything up to regulate power and make sure the led's don't blow from a power spike.
I've looked at a set from a friends 65 and think I could come up with a decent way to get it to look like similar to this setup by running 2 rings of led's around the backup light and the same on the outboard light too! got to use surface mount leds but it looks do-able, once I get the dart drivable I'm going to explore the possibility of making the lights for 66 and 65's(after I get a set of 65 lights and buckets) did my buddies 65 Satellite by just making it the shape of the bucket and them filling it in totally , looked pretty good too! and he can still go back To bulbs if he wants to.
 
Some batch! That looks good. Someone else on here did something similar with a 64-66 barracuda using trailer light fixtures
 
MoparDaddy said:
Some batch! That looks good. Someone else on here did something similar with a 64-66 barracuda using trailer light fixtures
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thanks. yeah someone else did it with trailer/truck lights. looks pretty good too! But nothing fit in my buckets so I had to make my own up. I wish I could have gotten something to fit it would have saved me a ton of time. I like how they came out though.

I'm working on getting the boards made by a company so it looks sort of professional for version 2.0 , but I can live with how it looks now

On to version 2.0 though with built in power regulation to 12 volts no matter what the car is putting out 13.5 14.6 or more and hopefully SMD leds so I can almost double the amount of leds available and smooth out the C-ring look
 
66Dvert said:
thanks. yeah someone else did it with trailer/truck lights. looks pretty good too! But nothing fit in my buckets so I had to make my own up. I wish I could have gotten something to fit it would have saved me a ton of time. I like how they came out though.

I'm working on getting the boards made by a company so it looks sort of professional for version 2.0 , but I can live with how it looks now

On to version 2.0 though with built in power regulation to 12 volts no matter what the car is putting out 13.5 14.6 or more and hopefully SMD leds so I can almost double the amount of leds available and smooth out the C-ring look
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Wow! Good thing you like taking pics of the process and results, cause I want to see that!
 
MoparDaddy said:
Wow! Good thing you like taking pics of the process and results, cause I want to see that!
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HAH I don't like taking picture, they are there to remind me where everything goes. I have a part I've been staring at for an hour and for the life of me I can't figure out where it goes other than on the car somewhere. time to dig through the picture again! I think it's a window stop but can't be sure.
 
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