Vanagon – hacking switches to add LED lights

A couple of kludges here, adding LED lights to the headlight switch and the rear defogger switch. I did this to bug my friend Simon 🙂

First the headlight switch. There are two kinds of switch, one has a white plastic insert in the hole on the back of the switch and one doesn’t. It’s the former that can be illuminated.

Here is a view of the back of the switch removed from the connector and you can make out the white plastic in the hole. Disregard that purple wire soldered to the spade connector, that was a failed experiment.

For a more professional way of installing a lamp into the switch look at this Samba thread. I didn’t have the little bulb holding clips shown in that thread, so I did it a little differently.

Now switch focus from the switch to the connector with all the wires coming out of it, sitting there in dash.

I used a bare bulb white LED and a resistor. The LED fits nicely into the hole in the switch connector and I opened the slots at the base of the hole with an awl so the legs of the LED would fit through. I then could push the LED into the hole and the legs of the LED poked through the other side. I soldered a wire onto one leg and a resistor onto the other. I forget the resistor value at the moment, but you can read the code in the picture. I soldered the other end of the resistor to the black and yellow wire coming into the switch connector. That wire is connected to the X-relay current path, so it get power when the key is on. The purple wire grounds the LED through the handbrake on warning light connecter, the brown wire on that white connector in the picture.

I chose to power the LED from the X-relay track for the reason that I wanted the headlight switch to illuminate when I turned the key, not when I switched on the lights (which seems rather redundant).

Here is the LED powered before the connector is mated to the switch.

Seems pretty bright. The icon on the switch is noticeably lit up even in daylight. I’ll see if it is too bright tonight.

The next kludge is the rear defogger light. There are two tiny little bulbs inside the switch, one to light up the tiny amber dot on the side of the switch when the defogger is on, and one to light up the switch when the headlights/running lights are on. The latter was burned out in my switch. I pulled the back of the switch off (careful, springs and one ball bearing inside), and I put in a LED instead of an incandescent bulb. During the process I broke a little plastic shield that prevents the switch illumination light from also lighting up the little amber dot. One of the pictures shows the shield off, I glued it back on before reassembly of the switch. The leads of the bulbs in the switch are connected to the brass trace by simply being tucked under them. You can pry the trace up and slip the lead of the new bulbs under, then press the trace down again. The resistor can be tucked into a recess in the plastic. I have the negative leg of the LED tucked under the brass at the bottom, which is the “31” spade on the switch, and the positive leg curves up (covered in blue heat shrink) to tuck under the brass at the top, which is the “56b” spade (powered by the headlight dimmer switch).  The switch goes back together pretty easily.