944 Cowl 3rd Brake, Anyone using this fixture? Options

[Spoke]

A 914/944 owner asked if I could add LEDs to the 944 cowl 3rd brake fixture. He said this same fixture is also used on some Corvettes. Anyone use this on their 914?





For such a nice exterior, the bulbs are crappy push-in bulbs with even worse sockets. As always, I'm looking for a way to connect wires to this fixture w/o cutting, gluing, splicing. I could solder steel piano wire to the pigtails and plug in to the existing sockets but Steve doesn't think that will work well. There's 2 grommets to this fixture, one to the sealed lens and one to seal through the cowl.




There's almost enough room to get a 5mm LED on a board between the reflector and lens. You can see the edge of the reflector is curved. The LEDs don't fit at the top and bottom so the boards will have a cutout there for relief and for securing the boards.

The length is 11 inches so I'll make the board span the entire interior of the lens. I'm thinking 36 LEDs which will be quite bright.

[Spoke]

I'm contimplating using surface mount LEDs for this board but the board is too large to fit into my IR oven. I'll have to print this out to see how it fits in the enclosure.




Getting this arc of the board to follow the curve of the fixture was not trivial. First I had to determine the the amount of arc over the length of the fixture. I measured 85mil arc over the length of 12.5 inches of the lens. Using trig I calculated the radius of the curve of the fixture to be 229 inches.

I could have used an arc of 229 inches in Altium for the board outline but the maximum PCB workspace is like 10 x 10 feet. 229 inches is just over 19 feet and I couldn't get the arc to work. So I ended up using small sections of straight lines to make the arc.