switching standars turn signal,oil indicator,nutral light to tiny led's

[dizzle]

hey so im thinking about getting rid of the centre dash lights to yellow red and green along with the plastic housing and switching it up and building a sleek little board to hold some tiny single led lights my question is if i get these tiny lights will i need to put in some sort of inline resistor or anything or will the pos and negative hook up work ? i eventually will be changing my xs 400 into a bobber over the winter but for now thought id do some suddle touches.

 

[JPaganel]

Oil and neutral light are no problem. I did that.

Turn signal light will not work if just replace with a LED because the way that circuit is laid out the direction of the current switches depending on which side blinker is turned on.

 

[dizzle]

hmmm thats lame you would think that just being a single dash light with 2 wires it would work just fine oh well just guess i will have to play around with different things

 

[XS-Time]

I did a little (lot) of research on LEDs as I would like to do the same thing. It all depends on if you are using a LED "lamp" or just the single LED like you would buy from Radio Shack.
The single LED (looking like a Tic Tac with two parallel metal terminals) will burn out almost instanty without a proper resister hooked up. There are formulas available online if you look for them. There is a bit of reading required as the color of the led will dictate which resisters are required. Also how many LEDs per resister and Proper polarity. It sounds complicated at first but it's not to bad.
If you are talking about a ready made lamp meant for automotive (12v) application then they will wire in just fine. If you look closley at the "lamp" you will be able to see the resistors already wired in.

 

[ThePsuedoMonkey]

It's generally a bad idea to run LEDs without a resistor, since they can't restrict the current through them without one (killing the LED). Resistors are cheaper than LEDs anyway, and they're not hard to work with, just pick the right ones for the job. Most 5mm LEDs can handle 20-30mA, which gives a conservative estimate of 600 ohms for a white/blue LED and 650 for most other colors. If you want to use the smaller (3mm) LEDs, just double those resistor values, since they seem to handle much less current.

The turn signals can use LEDs if you use one for each side (look at your wiring diagram to see what I mean) and add in a separate ground for 'em. Here's what I did to my mostly stock setup.

 

[XS-Time]

Ha!
I just noticed you are from Kamloops. Will be going there in a couple of weeks to drop off the daughter at TRU.
If you are looking for small (1cm Dia.) lamps go to Princess Auto. I picked up 3 for my bike last spring (in Kamloops). They are led and have the resisters built in.
Go through the front doors and about the second isle on your right.

 

[dizzle]

haha xs-time thats awesome thanks i will have to go check out princess auto my neighbour is building a bobber to and he got a led taillight with a built in license plate light from there it is pretty sweet iv only been in there once but i will be making a trip very shortly

 

[JPaganel]

Resistors will help if you are switching the actual turn signals to LED. They will not help with the turn signal indicator.