LED light to Hard Top Hatch glass

[oldmacdonald]

Finally got my LED light on the hard top hatch on the weekend.

Came up with the idea when I had cause to kill some time having a little snooze in the back one night (was officially putting the baby to sleep in a dark place).

Here's some photos of the finished product, there's nothing to it.

Picked up an LED strip light off ebay for under $10, including postage from HK(!)

Stuck it to the "bottom" edge of the hatch glass with some black foam double-sided tape, $1 from Bunnings:



The main body of the strip light is about 6mm square, the tape is 10 or 12mm wide, so I stuck the tape to the back and folded it around one of the sides of the strip light and pushed it into the corner of the hatch frame so it's secured on two faces if that makes any sense.



The cable is secured to the side of the hatch glass with adhesive cable tie patches:



Got a tilt switch from Jaycar and stuck it inside the wiper motor cover so that the LED's only come on when the hatch is raised.



Cable follows the existing wiring through the hardtop, and I put a plug in so that the hard top can still be removed.



From there the cable is run inside the existing loom, under the carpet and up the roll bar (under the cover) to the rear interior light, where it's hooked up with wire tap connectors. There's three wires to the interior light, the black one is negative and the middle wire is the supply to the globe which is what you want to parallel.

The end result is very good and well worth the $15 or so it cost me. Here's some photos of the hatch closed and open, the first one doesn't show much but it's taken with exactly the same camera settings as the second to give you some idea of what it's like.

[oldmacdonald]

Two of the photos aren't showing up on my computer, can someone confirm if the tilt switch photo is working properly?

[BENAMON]

yep all working for me. looks great!

[damxr]

Awesome job mate! Looks good!

[JasperJ]

Well done,

How much light does it actually throw out. If you drop something small there could you find it at night?

[oldmacdonald]

Glad the photos are working.

As far as bang for bucks goes this is definitely up the list of worthwhile stuff to do.

I was originally going to stick another strip to the inside of the hardtop above the glass opening but I don't think it's really necessary.

Forgot to say before you want a 96cm LED strip and it only pulls about 400mA when it's on. Next job is to replace the interior light globes with LED's. I managed to flatten the battery while I was doing this job, but I did have the interior lights, the radio and a big two-foot camping fluoro going for almost two hours.

[Wallyd]

Just purchased it, $8.28 delivered....