After sitting on my new odometer wheel and finally got around to taking on the job. Start to finish.. 40min. Not bad at all. Such a small thing made my day!

Now I want to put LED lights in since I know it should be simple to change. Any vendors you can recommend? Cheers

 

Congrats! Not so tough was it? What sort of LED's are you thinking? I was unable to locate any that would plug into the circuit board like stock. I ended up getting 2 12 LED panels from Pep Boys and running the wiring out the back through the holes originally occupied by the bulb sockets. I had to trim one end of each light board ever so little and then super glued them in place. For my optional gauges, I used replacement bulbs from superbrightleds.com They worked great. I also installed some cool gauge faces from davebarton.com while I had it open.




Here's w/ the new LED's


crappy instrument lighting/no flash pic


For anyone who has driven a 240, you know instantly what an improvement this is. I used clear LED's because I'm an old fart, but red, blue, yellow green and who knows what else is available.

 

That looks quite nice. Id probably go for blue since my wagon is blue and my radio illuminates blue. Where did you run the wires from the LEDs to? Was that difficult to do.

PS. Not a difficult job at all for the odometer replace. Its true that you have to manual turn the wheels to get the broken teeth out before putting it back together.

 

For power, after I spliced the two lights together, I ran a wire over to the back side of the dimmer switch on the output side so they would be tied into the dimmer.

 

These should fit right into the socket so that you don't have to do any rewire...

http://www.superbrightleds.com/cgi-b...FWLED-xHP5.htm

They are polarized so if they don't work one way you need to turn them around.

 

Those will work with older clusters but by 89, Volvo switched to a one piece bulb/socket. I actually bought some of those and then discovered the bulbs would not separate from the sockets. So...pulled a couple of bulbs from an older cluster circa 81 or 82. I knew their sockets came loose. Popped the single LEDs in no problem. The issue was the sockets from the older clusters have the locking ears and electrical contacts in a different orientation so it was a no go. Hence, the panels.

 

Mine is an '88, but I dont think the bulbs separate on mine either.. I have these LEDs but I cant get the bulbs out.

 

Yeah, just looked it up in VADIS. As I suspected, they transitioned in 85 when the speedo went from cable to electronic.

 

Yeah, I thought about whether that was an issue after I posted last night. I have the older style cluster.