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.
What the dash looked like with the OEM lights. As you can see, several bulbs are burned out.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.
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.All finished! Look at how the needles and odometer turned white compared to the orangeish they were before. Much better.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.
oday I decided it was time to do something about the faded grill on the “new” Ranger. It started its life silver/chrome, but in the past 13 years had turned to a horrible yellowish plastic color. I decided I’d give plastidip a shot after hearing great things. I pulled the grill (which was held on by the most brutal clips) got it masked off. Lacking any sort of proper paint studio, I decided to use the bed of the truck and a tarp to get the job done and it worked great. I applied probably 10+ coats in the end, mostly due to the honeycomb pattern which required a lot of sprays at a lot of different angles to cover. In the end I think it turned out pretty good!
The starting point of the grill. It was looking pretty tired, especially against the black of the truck.I pulled the Ford badge, masked the trim (I was afraid if I tried to remove the grill from the trim I’d destroy the plastic clips that held it in place) and set it up and got to work in the bed of the truck.Nearing completion, just a couple more coats to go.The completed job with everything installed back onto the truck.I also “rejuvenated” the headlights. I forgot the name of the product but it involved wet sanding the lenses down and then applying an IR curing epoxy to them to gloss them up. Not bad for 13 year old lenses.
Close up. That badge could use a good cleaning, I think.
In the end I’m really happy with how everything turned out. I’m interested in seeing how well the plastidip holds up, but even if it’s not well, it was $5 and a couple hours wasted at the most.
