Reverse instrument panel lights

[Corollanyc]

How hard is it to change the lights on the gagues like the ones they sell on ebay with the blue and red colors is it easy enough anyone can do it? Why do they call them reverse? whats the most i should pay for em?

[virtualkuz]

They are called reverse because instead of the numbers lighting up like on regular dashboards the background lights up while the numbers stay dark at night. As for the difficulty it depends on how much you need to take apart to get the gauge cluster out. On some cars you have to take apart the whole dash. Plastic pieces also have a tendency of breaking in the dash as well, leaving you with a loose rattling "used-to-be nice and stock" dash. I wouldn't bother.

[Ukrainian102]

Yeah every time you take apart the dash its one more opportunity to crack some plastic or drop a screw somewhere deep into the car, since you're working in such a tight space. It's a pain in the ass on some cars, especially since Toyota uses a lot of plastic pins and clips to hold things down, rather than screws. These pins and clips have tendency to break if you pull too hard, and they won't come loose unless you do. Anyway, sorry for the rant, but I just hate taking apart the car interior, I've done it so many times and its a pain in the ass.

But if you wanna do the reverse glow gauges you're gonna have to splice into somewhere to make the electroluminescent string glow. Keep it stock I say; whatever you don't want the gauges to be so bright they blind you. If you want a brighter dash change the bulbs in the instrument cluster to 168 instead of the stock 194. Then again a lot of Toyotas use LEDs now, and those are hard to change.

[/end rant]


Also, I don't know why they're called reverse. If you look on eBay, it's the numbers that light up, not the background.