Automotive

Replacing dash bulbs with LEDs

When I bought the Ranger, it had several dark spots on the dash from burned out bulbs.  I looked around online and found that a popular mod was to convert the bulbs to LEDs.  These both look brighter and should last much longer than incandescent bulbs.

I saw a lot of referrals to superbrightleds.com but their prices seemed a bit steep for LEDs.  I searched around and found these on Amazon.  I only needed 6, so the 10 pack for $8 seemed like a price I couldn’t beat.  For reference, the main bulbs in the dashboard are size 194 wedge type.  The green tint of the dash is actually done by the dash, and the bulbs behind it are white.  You’ll notice on the old picture the needles and whatnot have a sort of orangeish glow which appears to come from the temperature of the incandescent bulbs used, as the LEDs changed these all to a much more modern looking white.  The 4×4 and headlights switch are a special Ford only bulb that from my research can only be replaced by purchasing a whole new switch from Ford for way too much money, however a user on the Ford Ranger Forums “Buggman” makes a custom LED that fits the housing on the switch.  I ended up ordering a couple of those from him to light those switches up and they were well worth the $25 or so I paid.

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What the dash looked like with the OEM lights. As you can see, several bulbs are burned out.
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The back of the dashboard. The black caps are the bulbs I’m looking to replace here. You just twist them a quarter turn counter clockwise and they pop out. Pull the bulb out of the cap, replace, and reverse the process to put them back in.

I found out the hard way by putting the dash back in and lighting it up that unlike incandescent bulbs, LEDs care about polarity!  Half of my lights didn’t work and I had to pull the dash and flip them to get them to light up!  This is why we test things before reassembly.

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Left: Factory incandescent. Right: New LED. I went with this style that had some on the sides to try to get a more even light spread since 6 bulbs need to light the whole dash.
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All finished! Look at how the needles and odometer turned white compared to the orangeish they were before. Much better.
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The HVAC controls are still stock bulbs as they take a different size and were functional at the time. They’re a bit dimmer than the LEDs but not enough to be a huge deal. I was also able to color match my head unit pretty well, I think. In this photo it looks blue-er than it does in person.