Well, I have a thing for special effects lighting, and today I started modding my car with some LED's. I robbed the 12V power source from the cigarette lighter (I'll never smoke) to power quite a few LED's all throughout the car - in the vents, floors, grill, etc. While I was doing the final touches (ie, soldering the toggle switch connections) I had accidentally left the battery connected after a final test, the two wires touched, and bang, I blew a fuse. Easy enough fix - I had it replaced and the new LED's working perfectly in no time.
Then tonight I went out for a movie with some friends, afterwards came outside and realized that my instrument panel lights weren't lighting up. I checked through all the fuses, replaced any that looked "iffy", and still no light on my speedometer, tach, yet my warning lights, turn signal indicators, and bright light indicators still work. I'm trying to think of how this may have happened...? I realize that the short I created that took out the first fuse can cause havoc on an electrical system, but the cigarette lighter and the instrument panel are two completely different circuits. I'm wondering if anyone has any ideas, before I have to go up into my dash to see if the lights suddenly all burned out at once. Since everything else on that circuit still is live, it leads me to believe that these lights simply just burned out all at once.
This happening, now I'm wondering about new ways to light up the gauges. Since the warning lights still all work, I'm thinking 'why not get creative' here, and rig some new lights to light up the panels. The themed color I've got is blue, and if I could, I think that lighting up the dash panel blue instead of the boring old white, would be pretty awesome. However, I don't know where I could find a blue replacement light, and I don't think LED's would spread light well enough to illuminate the dash, at least from the back. Any ideas from anyone? I'm considering the possibility of lighting the dash from the front - get some TCH3's and mount them aimed at the dash, it would be rather unobtrusive but I'm not sure how it would look in lighting up the dash. Any ideas, feel free to email me, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com
Thanx!
-Aaron