Spaceboy1980

iTrader: (6)

I put this in fabrication rather than audio because it's not just swapping stereos.

So when I got my Camaro it had a late model Delco in it. Worked fine, but looked out of place in the interior. I ended up swapping it out for another because it turned out to be a truck unit with the side brackets removed and there was nothing holding it in the dash, it was just sitting there. The replacement ended up having most of the back light bulbs burnt out, yea fun. Well in the mean time I replaced my dash bulbs and HVAC controls to to red LEDs and it made the blue display on the Delco really, really out of place. Something had to be done.

I have another Delco that I removed from my truck because the CD player quit working in it, what a great sample to disassemble and learn from. It turns out taking it apart was simple. I was able to remove the face plate circuit board to replace the one in the Camaro with the burnt bulbs.

Once I had the circuit board out I noticed nothing inside was coloring the LCD display so I popped the lens out of the face plate. It just looked smoked so I took some acetone to it and what do you know, blue ink came off.

Off to Amazon for this in the thinnest transparent red:



So once I got it, I noticed it was quite thick but not enough to bother me I mean my stereo already looked out of place. I traced my lens on it and tried to cut it in a shear. Don't cut it in a shear, the edge shattered and my traced out piece was cracked all over the place. Well after some research it turns out you treat acrylic like glass. I scored a new area with a knife and broke it over an edge. Snapped of okay, but the edge was a little rough.

Well I had made it a little large so I traced the lens onto it with a sharpie and took it to the belt sander and sanded it to it's final dimensions. I cleaned up the edges by hand with some finer paper and checked the fit of which I was satisfied.

So I took apart my good radio, swapped the board for the face plate and popped out the blue lens and stuck my red one in using the glue left from the old lens. After I put it all back together I was pleased to see this:



It was completely worth it. You could do this in any color you can find a transparent sheet in.

majobis

iTrader: (3)

In the spring, I did all LED in my dash and upgraded to the same Delco you have. The blue radio light in mine now seems too bright; especially since ALL faceplate bulbs are burned out (just like in my Tahoe). That mod you did looks great. Well done!

Spaceboy1980

iTrader: (6)

If the blue matches your LEDs but is just too bright, I would trim a piece of window tint and stick over it. Another way to change colors would be to clean off the lens and just put colored tint over it. After playing with acetone I used regular laquer thinner and it took the ink right off. When I rubbed hard with that though I got slight hazing, very slight. I believe I could have buffed the hazing out with just some polishing compound by hand it was that light.

The burned out bulbs can be swapped but they are spendy, like 2.50 each from radio shack and I think I counted 10 of them. So 25 bucks to do them all and you have to desolder them and solder on the new ones. Bad form GM, bad form.

nater

I have never taken apart the delco radio to see exactly what bulbs you are talking about but you should be able to replace them with LEDs like on your dash lights

also i was wondering could this radio mod work on other radios or posibly a digital dash