Glove box light

Strange. Now the (stock) glove box light is definitely working. Maybe this is just selective memory at work.

I did try the same LED bulb in the licence plate lights and it doesn't work there either, so it's probably just a defective bulb. The two connecting wires that are threaded through the clip got bent pretty badly out of shape even during the first connection, so even if the bulb was hooped it's hard to say whether it wasn't just me who screwed it up. Oh well, it's only a couple bucks for a new one. =)

As for the electricals, no, everything in the body is working fine. While I'm not electrical-savvy enough to run voltage testing across all of my fuses (lacking a multimeter and all), my tail lights are fine and I don't have anything that appears blown. I'm obsessive-compulsive about disconnecting the battery before doing any work that could even come close to touching a chassis ground or electrical component, so nothing was ever modified with the battery still connected.

The solder job in the domes was because I got the 12-SMD boards. I couldn't initially comprehend the 194-style connectors that the boards came with from Diode Dynamics, which would ordinarily plug in the little twist-out stock clip which holds the stock bulb*. Instead I cut the 194 clip off and soldered the two leads from each board to the four holes in the roof module on either side of the stock clip (I'll snap a pic). The dome light works phenomenally well and I don't get the flickering issue or the weather sensitivity that I read about in the HowTo thread with other people's dome lights.

My brother was a bit shaky with the soldering iron while I held the wires and solder in place, though, so he managed to make a small cosmetic burn on my dome. Next time he's holding the wires and I'm holding the solder and iron. ;-P

My setup still allows a swap-out of the LED boards in case of failure -- I just tug the board and adhesive off of the dome and then detach from the tiny white clip on the wire leads to replace. I retain the same wire leads from the solder job and the tiny clip acts as my easy-to-remove connector. In fact, having installed the blue LED boards, I'm very much considering switching to the white boards instead -- the blue is a bit too far out there for my tastes (also, if anyone were to flick the dome light on and off, I could technically be fined for impersonating a police vehicle ;-)). Still neat though.

(Also, whoever said the stage three blue dome lights are too bright is spouting nonsense. With the stage three blues, it lights up the whole interior of the car but still feels pretty mellow, possibly because it's only one of the three components of white light and it's harder to see in purely blue light.)


* When I tried to pull out the stock bulb from the clip and it didn't budge, I thought it was fixed in place, and resorted to soldering. Heh. Then I played around with the stock bulbs after the solder job was already done and I figured out that the bulb WAS removable and the 194-clip would work after all. Live and learn! Still, the soldering job would be easy to undo (just pick up the molten solder with the iron or a specialised solder syringe), and the only symptom if I were to remove the solder would be a hint of carbon scoring on the plastic surrounding those holes, probably attributable to simple voltage surge or weathering.