PeachParts Mercedes-Benz Forum - View Single Post

Jeremy5848 · #13 11-05-2008, 10:12 PM

Hey, this is gonna be easier than I thought.

First, get an extra idiot light socket for your instrument cluster. You can use either the single wire kind with a metal shell that grounds through the cluster or the insulated kind that has a separate ground wire. The first picture is that second kind because it's all I had in my parts box. Run a wire from any one of the pins in the "big plug" of the glow plug relay. Make sure the wire is well insulated and route it alongside the existing wiring harnesses, then stuff it through a convenient hole in the firewall so that it ends up behind the instrument cluster. Connect the wire to the new light socket and ground the other wire, if you have a two-wire socket. Put in the same bulb as the other idiot lights use and test the light by turning on the ignition switch. The light should glow as long as the glow plugs have power. If you have afterglow, they should stay on for the full 30 seconds or however long it takes your relay to time out.

The light goes in hole #2 of the instrument cluster. In the 124 cars and, AFAIK, the 123 models, there is nothing in that hole from the factory.

Now remove the strip that has the labels for the idiot lights on the right side of the instrument cluster. The right-most one has a glow plug symbol – yes, the one in the picture says "Check Engine" because my parts bin cluster came out of a gasser. Either way, the place in the strip for the #2 bulb has nothing written on the strip. All you have to do is put a label on it so that it says "AFTER GLOW" in sillouette. Any color will do, it will look black anyway.

You can write on the strip with a felt-tip pen but if your writing is as sloppy as mine it will look really bad. If you're good with tiny stick-on letters, you can try that. I plan to experiment with a sign made on my computer and then photographed with a film camera (I still have one). White letters will turn out dark on the film and if I can get the size right, I can cut a piece out of the film and glue it onto the strip that goes into the cluster. If that works out, I'll offer them free to the forum since I have to burn a whole roll of film anyway.

I'll post results in a week or two after I figure out how to scale the sign to get the size right on the film.

Jeremy