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]

Decided to take another route on the boards. Instead of one 11 inch long board, I'll do 2 smaller 5.25 inch boards. The boards can now fit in the IR oven so I'll do surface mount high power LEDs with focusing lenses.