Disclaimer: The following is provided as a GUIDE ONLY, and neither myself nor Ozhonda take any responsibility for the outcomes of someone else doing the following. You follow these steps at your own risk!
Aim: To use the EG dimmer with an EG6 cluster. (also potentially LED's)
Required: EG6 cluster, dimmer, wire, more twist-lock dash cluster bulbs.
Steps:
Ok, while looking on the net for some LED globes for my EG6 cluster I came across a few threads about how the dimmer doesn't work if you swap it for your standard EG cluster. I don't have a dimmer, so this isn't overly useful to me, but since I'm a little bored and interested in electronics I figured there's got to be a logical workaround for this.
So I looked at the EG cluster wiring diagram and I noticed that the power for the gauge lights comes in on pin B11. On the stock cluster it then heads out on pin B12, and off to the dimmer switch (which is just a variable resistor). The EG6 clusters weren't originally designed to use a dimmer so the power earths out on the common ground for the cluster, pin A5.
Here's the EG Cluster (with tacho) wiring diagram from the manual that I stuck together into a single image with photoshop:
So basically (if you have a dimmer) all you have to do is make the lights ground through pin B12.
To do this without connecting to the existing earth (pin A5) you'll need to use a different style of dash globe so the contacts don't touch the circuit board.
Either something like a Narva 47734 dash globe (below), or modify another twist-lock dash globe so the contacts no longer touch the circuit board.
Then all you have to do is rig up some wiring from B11, to each gauge illumination globe (it's only those 5 in the pic) and then back to B12. If using the Narva globe you could just solder the wires to the existing solder points on the back.
I used yellows2k's cluster picture for a diagram because I noticed he was quite keen on working out how to do this
Plus I was too lazy to go pull mine out of the car just for photos right now hehe.
A5 is the black wire in the middle of the left plug. B12 is the top pin on the right plug, and B11 is the one under that.
I'm not 100% sure that the dimmer will operate properly while the bulbs are in parallel because I don't have one to test with. So if you do have trouble then just link them up in series instead. The problem with the globes being in series though is that if one bulb blows, they'll all go out.
If you decide to try this out, post up how it goes.
Other comments:
I'm also thinking that since some people think there's an internal load resistor inside the EG6 cluster that prevents LED's from seeming any brighter if used in place of incandescent bulbs; if you wire from B11, to each light and then to pin A5, it should bypass this resistor (if it does exist) and thus make the cluster brighter.
After I get some new wide angle LED's, if it doesn't seem bright enough, I'll wire them up externally from the cluster and see if it makes a difference and report back.
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