How to Make a Custom Dome Light

I decided that my old school incandescent light in the dome had to go. I have decided to go with a blue theme for my interior, or I went down to the local Radio Shack and picked up some LED's. The only problem with swapping out the dome light, is that you have to not only jam some LED's in there (unless you buy the more expensive auto bulbs that are rated for 12v), but you also have to lower the voltage. Basically there's a lot of math involved, and since it's summer break, I don't feel like doing it, so I used www.ledcalc.com. Basically you use 12 for your supply voltage, a input the Volts and Amps from the LED packaging. There's a lot of tutorials on there about how to wire, and it will give you the exact specs, and the realistic specs. It's a good tool. Basically this was my shopping list (all parts numbers are from Radio Shack):

• 1x Soldering Iron (actually this is a kit, it's cheap and comes with the Solder)(640-2802B)
• 1x Tip Cleaner and Tinner (640-0020D)
• 2x Ultra High Brightness Blue LED (you can use as many as you wish but will need different resistance)(276-0006)
• 1x 330 ohm Resistor (271-1571)

Basically that and a little skills. Here's the lights wired to the resistors. I used some heat shrink to keep them from grounding out, but tape would work as well:

As you can see, I soldered the Resistor to the first positive (+) and then the first negative (-) to the second positive (+). Basically all you would have to do then is some how wire the lights to the car. Easier said than done. I tried the first time to take out the bulb, crush it, and use the filaments to solder right to the LED's, and it worked! But then it died. The filaments got really hot and melted the solder, so it died after a day or two. Then i decided to hard wire. What i had to do was remove the dome light. Basically all you do is pinch the two plastic sides, and pull on the cover, then there is one screw and a connector. When you remove it you should have this:

And the connector where the light goes in is here:


Well, i was going to try to fit a soldering iron in that tiny space, but then i remembered that plastic melts and so that was a no go. As you can see though the connectors continue on the other side of that connector like so (sorry for the blurry pics, no image stabilization):

Now the one on the bottom is the positive (+) and the one on the top is negative (-). I figured that out by following the ground where it screws in to the connector. Basically at this point i just had to solder in my lights. First i did have to ruff up the surface, with a sharp object that came with the Soldering Iron tool kit, to get the solder to stick, but it worked eventually. At that point it's just a matter of positioning the bulbs and screwing it back in the car! Easy as pie right? Here's some pics with the light and cover off, with flash on, and without flash:




It's actually a lot brighter than the factory light, and it looks much cooler. Yeah, I get rice points for this one!

If you have any questions leave me a comment, and I'll try to answer them.

Thanks for reading!