Re: Question,,,Dash board lights.

On Thursday, 23 October 2014 15:00:15 UTC-7, Jay Rod. wrote:

Men of Mopar, Question!
Are there any alternative to getting brighter lighting on a stock 65 Coronet dash/instrument cluster panel.
The same goes for me headlights.

Answer is YES in both cases, but shop very, very carefully because there is a mountain of junk on the market, all of which is hyped as an "upgrade". You're just out time/money/effort if the dashboard light swap doesn't work well, but if you change the headlamps to one of the many bogus "upgrades" on the market, now you're endangering life safety -- your own and that of everyone else on the road with you. Same goes for the rest of the exterior lights. That doesn't mean you have to put up with pathetic sealed beams, but it does mean, again, shop very carefully.

What to buy depends on how well you want to see and what your budget looks like. The first to-do item on the list doesn't directly involve the bulbs; that is to make sure the dash light rheostat in your headlamp switch is clean and in good shape. They corrode and degrade over time, starving the dash bulbs.

Dash bulbs themselves: don't go crazy; you don't want the dashboard to be too bright because a super-bright dashboard screws up your ability to see in the distance at night. A '65 car would still have the bayonet-base dash bulbs rather than the '66-up push-in wedge-base bulbs. There are excellent direct-swap incandescent bulbs that are over 2x brighter than the originals. They're not easy to find locally. I stock them; shoot me an email. Or if you want to do this just once and never, ever want to have to think about dashboard bulbs again, then there are particular, specific (Osram) LED bulbs worth getting. But the ones worth getting are expensive, and the cheap ones aren't worth getting. More options by swapping to the '66-up wedge-type bulb holders, which fit directly into the '65 dashboard gauge cluster.

Headlamps: See articles on Allpar at http://www.allpar.com/fix/electrical/headlights/index.php and http://www.allpar.com/fix/electrical/headlights/ecode.php . The photos of the headlight beams on the road in both articles are very poor, but the text is very descriptive and accurate.

You might also want to look at http://www.allpar.com/reviews/other/LED-third-brake-light.html .

I'm not super keen on getting commercial on the list here; I don't know for sure, but I am guessing it's against the rules (or at least frowned on) so if you wanna talk shopping lists and such, shoot me an email.

\6D