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.

[Mark Henry]

Very cool, I made my own flasher for my 67 bug. It's quite complex because the one 9-pin flasher controls turn, emergency and high/low beam lights. It was complex, I'd have to check my notes but IIRC I had to wire three DPDT relays together to duplicate the function of the one OE flasher.

I did the project because the flasher is scarce (NOS$200-$300) and the $80 re pops are known to be junk.