Another "5 watt instrument bulbs in 300D" question
 

Today I decided to change my 300D's instrument panel's 3 watt bulbs with some 5 watt bulbs I had from another cluster. I've read though that the brighter bulbs may melt something because the give off more heat. I like how much brighter the instruments look and that I don't need to have the rheostat turned up all the way. Does anyone think I made the wrong decision and that I should put back 3 watt bulbs? I don't want to spend the money on LED's.
~DJ

I can tell you for sure that I thought I was bright with my 5 watt bulbs until I next looked at the back of the cluster. Definite melt around the bulb mounts. Since the back of the cluster is also the pc board for much of the instrumentation, you don't want it melting.

I went back to the 3 watt bulbs. Dimmer is brighter, in the long run. Perhaps I'll eventually try led's. I'm sure taking apart the cluster and cleaning it would also be beneficial, but what a pain....

I tried green, blue, yellow, and white LEDs in all my center and cluster lights. I settled with green in the center, green in the turn indicators, yellow in the low fuel light. I did not change the lower lights (Alt, seatbelt, etc.) because the LED was too focused and I ended up using 5W zenon bulbs for the main cluster lights. The LEDs were too dim and did not diffuse the light well enough.

So far I have not had any heat issues with the 5W bulbs and I would reccomend them to everyone who want's to see their gauges at night :D

I replaced the Ash Tray light and the Shift Indicator light with LED's (autolumination.com) and they are very bright!

I will be doing the Climate Control lights next. They will take some doing. The bulbs must be heat welded in their sockets. Neither would come out and both of the bulbs broke off. Guess i have to do some digging.

Joe

Some of the 1.2W bulbs in my climate control melted a little plastic, I can't even imagine how a 5W would do in the dash. I'd stick the 3W back in BUT you should also take some time to clean inside of there. Use some qtips and isopropryl alcohol (rubbing), you'll be amazed how dirty it really is in there and how much better it'll work when done. The light goes from the bulb and is supposed to be reflected off of these white surfaces to make it to the top. Whatever makes it to the clear part on top goes out the front. While it may not be as bright as the 5W bulbs it should be a vast improvement over what you had.

When I istalled the 5 watt bulbs in my gauge cluster, I did it with the intention of keeping them turned down a bit but at a bit brighter than I would have had with the rheostat at full brightness with the 3 watt bulbs. I'm going to try to keep aware of any odd smells or thin wisps of smoke coming form the cluster though. So far so good and its nice to look at a brighter cluster. I also cleaned the prisms in the cluster as well. Its easy to do. There's a good tip on how to do it at Boostnbenz's site.