Making Your Flasher Relay LED Compatible Options

[Spoke]

This thread is meant to help those implementing LED turnsignals on their 914.

Standard flasher relays were designed to flash 2 standard bulbs (21W each) for turnsignals or 4 standard bulbs with 4-ways on.

LED replacements burn between 2W and 5W and electrically may not behave at all like a standard bulb. The LED replacements can cause all kinds of weird things like hyperflash (2x normal flash rate), dash indicators do not work, or the the flasher relay does nothing at all.

The 914 flasher is different for early cars 70-73 than later 74+ mainly because of the tach indicators. Early cars have individual L and R indicators and the 74+ have a single L+R indicator. Both are handled differently by the flasher.

There are LED-compatible flashers generally available at your FLAPS which are plug-in but not totally function compatible with the 914 standard flasher. The functional issue revolves around the 4th terminal which the 914 uses to activate the dash indicators.

The aftermarket flasher relays are EP26 (4 terminal) and EP36 (3 terminal). I've seen these at Pep Boys, Autozone, and Advance Auto to name a few FLAPS, usually for less than $15.

I'll detail the differences between early and late cars, as well as EP26 and EP36 in the next few posts.

[Chris H.]

Could you cover converting the single indicator to the dual L/R as well if it's not too much trouble? I have an aftermarket tach now in my '75 car and it has a L and R indicator on it.

[Spoke]

Could you cover converting the single indicator to the dual L/R as well if it's not too much trouble? I have an aftermarket tach now in my '75 car and it has a L and R indicator on it.

Yes. This is the most troublesome setup because of the single indicator.

If you have a tach with L and R indicators, it is easy to connect. Simply connect one end of the indicators to ground and the other to the turnsignal wires. These wires can be found easiest on the back of the hazard switch.