Has anyone disassembled their instrument cluster to replace a bulb?
If so, what colour are the bulbs?
I am trying to determine what makes the amber colour as seen when the lights are on.
Is the fascia tinted with amber on the back side making the numbers/letters illuminate in amber?

I would like to see if I can make my dash look like the cool blue/red as as seen in our Jetta (White on black during the day, blue on black at night)

I am not interested in the indiglo gauges at all, I was just wondering if the effect could be achieved by replacing the bulbs in the cluster.

Thanks!

The bulbs are white, standard mitsu back light bulbs. The orange is cause by a coated film on the back of the gauge faces. You can scrape the film off with high grid of sand paper, ie 400-600 and either repaint the back of the faces with translucent paint, or just buy blue bulb condems for a standard 194 bulb, that should fit over it.

is this for the 1G??? i have a 91, and i would love to do this,, all i have to do is scrape off the back??

I have already made my HVAC controls blue with littel blue tint bulbs... worked okay! i can't wait to make the guages blue!!!

I find you get a brighter ligth with blue tinted bulbs rather then with the condom, although the bulbs in the rice rocket shops could vary..

YOu need bright bulbs!!.. i personally used led's in all my hvac and guage cluster...... you have a couple problems thought to overcome...... the factory bulbs come with 2 metal sides to them and those need to be taken off and put onto your after market bulb to make contact with the plate........ the 2nd problem is that the led's or the blue condom just aren't as bright as origional so the dash doesn't seem quite as bright as you'd like it...... I'm currently trying to look into a fix for this. i know that there is a company that sell's the guage cluster so you can get the white/black day and blue/black night without the indiglo and that way you dont' have to worry about scratching off the amber paint as it is much easier said then done

Scratching of the amber paint is REALLY easy, and if you just use translucent paint on the back of the gauge faces all your brightness issues become solved.

You cant sand off the color on the back of the gauge faces without removing the dispersion pattern as well. If you lose the dispersion pattern, the light will not be as evenly distributed as before. This may be less of an issue with regular bulbs, but if you use LEDs it will become very spotty.

I did this to my car like 5-6 years ago
I just sanded off the back sides of the guages.

Then using blue transparent paint I lightly sprayed a couple coats on the back sides of the gauges.
Worked great and is real bright but like already said there are some spots that are slightly brighter then others, but it's not real noticeable.

Do a search on DSMTuners there is a 10 page thread on this as well as the reccomendations for replacing all the HVAC lights wil LED's