Petros wrote:looks like it has bright white light, rather than the soft green created by a plastic green cap on the tiny lights. that is the style for the '83-84 SR5 cluster. For the '86 like yours it should have different graphics, does the speed show accurate? did you get a chance to compare the speed to a GPS?
It had green bulbs but like I mentioned, I installed cool white LED's.
As far as speedo, I don't have a smart phone but I'll have to test it soon when I have a buddy with an iPhone.
i love the stock green so much, i've amassed the plastic green covers and installed them in my corolla and truck too. so retro, so tercel!
i'm curious about the speedo difference between years. i put the cluster from an '84 sr5 manual in an '87 dlx automatic but didn't have GPS or any other way to measure speed. seemed to be accurate enough though.
the green light is supposed to prevent you from loosing your night vision. Your eyes adjust to low light conditions, the light green and red/orange dash lights are supposed to not affect the light sensativeity of your eyes, so you night visions stays acute when you look at your dash. I do not know the effect of using a whitish/bluish LED light would do, seems it would be worse than a normal incandenct yellowish light.
It might be kind of fun to see if you could find some pink, purple or other non-standard color.
Irowiki, you may find if you replace the bulbs and put the little green socks back on the bulb will be brighter. As the bulbs age they tend to get dimmer.
license plats are not something I want people to be able to read better or from further away. There is no benefit to you, and only bad things can happen when your license plate is easier to read. I do not even wash mine, even if I wash and wax the rest of the car.
All the other lights I would want brighter however, the better other drivers can see me, and from further away, the safer I would be. So I had considered just replacing all of the other external lights with LED, as I have the inside dome light. But not the license plate lights please.
marlinh wrote:Irowiki, you may find if you replace the bulbs and put the little green socks back on the bulb will be brighter. As the bulbs age they tend to get dimmer.
i was going to suggest this. i had to replace a bunch of burnt out dash lights in my corolla so i did, but i also put the green condoms on them just because i love the retro toyota green. with the new bulbs, there is no issue with brightness. i'll try to take a pic and post it soon.
How about using gentle heat from a hair dryer?
Tom M.
T4WD augury?
"Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?' Let us go and make our visit." T.S. Eliot - "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
"Now and then we had a hope that, if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates." Mark Twain
It's been snowing for the past day and a half here in Portland, almost around 5 inches. I took the Tercel to the grocery store today though and surprisingly it was just fine, even for a 2WD car. These pictures were from yesterday.
