How to Mod the fluorescent light in and LED using factory on/off button

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wigman

New Member
Hi. I'm new to the Delica world. In my short time repairing the neglected Delica I purchased I figured I would update the interior lighting to LED. I could not find an LED fluorescent or any fluorescent bulb that would replace the stock one. So instead I bought a 12" LED bar light.

I always like maintaining factory appearances and buttons so I figured out how to wire in the LED bar and still use the factory on/off button to turn the light on and off.

WARNING: doing this mod will not allow for the orange light to be turned on separately from the new LED. (this didn't seem like a big loss to me, I didn't really like the orange light)

On the control board there is an incoming harness that supplies DC voltage and ground that has a wire labeled + where is enters the board. Tap that wire, it is 12V bat positive for the positive side of the LED light.

Coming out of the board to the fluorescent bulb socket there is a black wire. Tap that wire, it is ground for the negative side of the LED light.

When the on button is pushed the ground is completed and turns on the LED light. It will turn on whether white or orange light is selected. If you turn on orange it will still come one but you can't see it well when the LED is lit.

Hope this is useful for someone!
 
wigman said:
Hi. I'm new to the Delica world. In my short time repairing the neglected Delica I purchased I figured I would update the interior lighting to LED. I could not find an LED fluorescent or any fluorescent bulb that would replace the stock one. So instead I bought a 12" LED bar light.

I always like maintaining factory appearances and buttons so I figured out how to wire in the LED bar and still use the factory on/off button to turn the light on and off.

WARNING: doing this mod will not allow for the orange light to be turned on separately from the new LED. (this didn't seem like a big loss to me, I didn't really like the orange light)

On the control board there is an incoming harness that supplies DC voltage and ground that has a wire labeled + where is enters the board. Tap that wire, it is 12V bat positive for the positive side of the LED light.

Coming out of the board to the fluorescent bulb socket there is a black wire. Tap that wire, it is ground for the negative side of the LED light.

When the on button is pushed the ground is completed and turns on the LED light. It will turn on whether white or orange light is selected. If you turn on orange it will still come one but you can't see it well when the LED is lit.

Hope this is useful for someone!
Click to expand...
I was thinking about doing something similar with a bunch of multi-colour leds. Do you have any photos of how you wired up the switches?
 
With this mod you don’t rewire any switches, just tap the dc positive coming in to the control board or any fused 12v hot, I chose that one because it was right there. And then tap the black ground wire going to the fluorescent bulb socket as the ground to the LED. The stock on off switch will enable or disable the ground turning the LED on or off.
 
I was thinking more and more about this, and I bet you could take flexible Color LED panel arrays and put them in there. Don't need to go THIS complex, but this video gives an idea of the color range. Needs to run off an arduino, but I suspect, even then taking less power than the stock light:

 
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