AMC Eagle license plate light fix (LEDs part three)

In my endeavors to make everything on this car an LED I have decided to replace the licence plate light with an LED (a spare dome light).  All the documentation I saw said to replace this part ‘as a unit’ but they clearly have never met me.  This part is not the easiest to upgrade, but I did it anyway.

It fell apart after I opened it

After taking a dremel to the seam I found that the old heat-damaged plastic broke clean in half.  The bulb was so long ago burned out, but the goop that stuck down the spot welded leads was still soft.  I dremeled it off to scuff up the pads I could solder to and epoxy-ed back together the base.

Always use a backing you don’t mind will stick to the final product, that board would be hard to fit in the car

I let that cure overnight because I didn’t read that I had bought knock-off JB-quick instead of knock-off JB-weld.  The next day I cleaned up the edges with a dremel and removed the STEEL wires from the LED module.  Those are not copper, don’t notch your nice diagonal cutters trying to cut them in half, desolder them with liberal use of flux and heat.  The LED module was balanced on a pile of copper wire stiffened with solder and a ground wire added underneath.

Make sure to center it or you will hate it later

I then gooped many coats of epoxy under the LED to build up the post that isn’t quite tall enough (BTW, you made sure it would fit in the lens, right?) and built up a second column to support the LED module.  When that was dry enough to work I inserted the base back in the lens and slowly added layers of epoxy to make sure I got a seal all around.

Remember to label the pins for positive and negative, mine are labeled but backwards so doubly unhelpful

Sanded down the sides so it was flush-ish and would fit back in the hole it came out of.  Now I have another lamp I should never have to replace, there will be a picture of it here after I finish painting the newly blasted license plate holder.

there, nice and bright.  Forever.

The home page for this project is here, it has a link to the album of pictures.