Work around for dash illumination with custom stereo

tcrote5516

Junior Member
Messages
86
My car came with a custom Alpine stereo and the original NIT was not included so my ability to pinout the connections and reverse engineer a way to make the center stack light up was not possible. I decided to take a page out of the Corvette design handbook and place a LED in the rear view mirror. Corvettes do this with an amber LED that lights up the shifter at night. I picked a green LED to better match the factory Maserati gauges.

While this isn't as good as the factory back lighting, it's certainly better than no lights at all. The key is to mount the led on the inside of the mirror housing and not on the surface or even flush mounted. If it's either of those it will be distracting at night. When mounted on the inside you can't see where the source of the light is from either seating position, you just get the glow on the center stack.

I disassembled the mirror and drilled a 3/8" hole in the bottom. I glued a 12v LED to the inside of that hole. I soldered the negative wire to the center pin on the three pin connector. The positive is actually marked on the mirrors pc board as such so I soldered the remaining wire from the LED to it. The LED will come on with your headlights or parking lights.

Just thought I'd share this 15 minute and $2 option.

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Oh, I also put these in the doors (purchased on ebay) and am pleasantly surprised at the quality of the projection. This picture was taken in daylight but at night they really look great:
tRALTC7.jpg
 

Stewart

Junior Member
Messages
472
Excellent ,don't suppose you know how to increase the brightness of the panel lights over normal, mine seem rather dim especially gear indicator read out on a bright day.
 

tcrote5516

Junior Member
Messages
86
Excellent ,don't suppose you know how to increase the brightness of the panel lights over normal, mine seem rather dim especially gear indicator read out on a bright day.

No I don't know but its on my list of things to figure out. I have the same problem with the top down on a sunny day while wearing sunglasses the gear selected is almost unreadable. This fall I'll tear into the cluster and see if I can come up with an easy solution.
 

tcrote5516

Junior Member
Messages
86
Bit cheesy...

That must be why they appear on many other luxury cars as factory options...because most people buying $100k+ vehicles are looking for "cheesy" lighting. How's that saying go? opinions are like...

ANYWAY, back to the relevant question from Mark; These replace the factory puddle lights with a bit of modification, you need to trim the corners of the existing cutout a bit to get these to fit. You can still revert back to stock without a problem even after modifying the opening (you know, if for instance Mike^ was coming over and you didn't feel like listening to him whine about them ;) .

Here's where I bought them from: http://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-MASERAT...e=STRK:MEBIDX:IT&_trksid=p2057872.m2749.l2649