Anyone have experience with these bulbs? : http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/Mercedes-W123-W124-W126-W201-Gauge-Cluster-LEDs-Kits-/270807317440?pt=Motors_Car_Truck_Parts_Accessories&hash=item3f0d5fbbc0#ht_3120wt_732

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'81 300SD

BUT!
He's got no Picture of the "Kit"
Which from what I can figure out is simply TWO(2) LED Bulbs.
1-2 hour install time?

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'84 300SD sold
124.128

No experience with those... BUT the photos are of a w140 cluster. Which is backlit. Nothing you do to the w126 is going to look like that.

For my w124, I removed the two rear lamps and clear prisms on top of the cluster and laid 4 incandescent pilot lamp assemblies (Radio Shack / Source) in the (now open) slots on top where the prisms were. These assemblies are about pencil thick, I soldered them in pairs butt to butt, then dropped a pair into a prism slot, each side of the cluster. They have to lay quite flush because that cluster slides into the dash.

I played with LED a bit before making up my mind. On a front reflecting cluster like we have, LEDs make terrible hot spots and have narrow lighting angles. All LEDs I tried, even large viewing angles with diffusers give hot spots. Yuck. Although LEDs are all the rage for funky lighting applications, this is not one well suited for them.

Nothing beats incandescents for any direct lighting of our clusters (removing the prisms). Plus they retain the stock dimmable function with no extra effort, plug and play. If you keep the prisms and just replace the rear bulbs, then LEDs will do fine as a light source because the prisms mix up the light path enough to do the job. If you go this route you'll want to orient the LED(s) to shine directly into the edge of the prism, not just pointing them into the holes where the bulb normally fits - that would waste most of the LED energy.

I chose red plastic pilot lamp housings for a few reasons... one of which is the red cast matches the all the switches in the car that I've reworked with red LED backlights. Red is also the easiest color on the eyes for night vision, if that matters to you. A side effect of using red lamps is that all the markings of all gauges become the same color - everything is pretty uniformly red, no oranges or whites show up.

My second choice would be bare-bulb white, which is going to give better contrast for faster gauge reads. And white would retain the unique gauge marking colors at night.

Here's an interesting site:
http://www.mbcluster.com/

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Cheers!
Scott McPhee

1987 300D