Elvisinarknasas

I recently upgraded my dash lights to some LED lights. After installing the lights and plugging everything back in, the dash lights would not come in and my guage were acting strang. The car starts and runs fine.

After driving for about 20 min my gauges, all but one start d working although the LED lights were still not on. I decided to turn the lights on while driving and. Price the car almost stalled and it did stall after I pulled it in the driveway and turned the lights on.

Any ideas why the LED lights don't work and why the car does after the headlights are turned on?

i have a new alternator and new battery

please help!

fastbackford351

Not sure I'm following the chain of events there because part of your post is jumbled as hell.

Off the cuff, I'm going to say that your led wiring is drawing way too much juice and leaving nothing for the ignition.

Elvisinarknasas

Thanks for the reply. Yes problem one is the new led lights not working, old ones worked fine but were basic bulbs that were 5 or 10 years old.

problem 2 are the gauges not working write, or sporadically working.


problem 3 are the headlights killing power when turned on. Headlights were recently upgraded about a week prior to brother newer bulbs.

Gun Jam

Oh its not that jumbled you just have to read past the ducking auto correct!
LEDs should draw way less power than any filament style bulb.. even a stock system should have plenty of overhead to run a 100+ leds.

Even if the alternator was totally offline the battery should have plenty of capacity to run everything for an hour or so.

There must be massive voltage sag across something when any load is applied. If the gauges are goofy and it has no ability to handle any load then its most likely a primary power wire failure. The heavy gauge wires from the battery to the ground (-) or solenoid (+) maybe loose or corroded clean them and check for tightness. make sure there is a ground strap from engine block to firewall, also if your 68 has the wire harness from firewall engine side into cab on drivers side like the 66 does...pull that apart and clean it.

fastbackford351

Are these factory gauges?

If your car is dying when you turn on the lights, then you've got something making a helluva draw that shouldn't be because like Jam says, those LED's shouldn't be drawing squat compared to the old school bulbs.

bop11

Try putting the old bulbs back in and then replacing just 1 led at a time. You may have a shorted one that is pulling down the system.
With the old bulbs does the engine still die when yu turn on the lights?

SteveL

Your going to have to sort through each wire until you find a bad connection or a short somewhere.
Here are a few issues I have come across with different older vehicles I have worked on. One (a dodge) was killing batteries and would not always get spark and run. The owner decided to run a hot wire from the pos battery post through a switch to the coil. If it stalled he would flip the switch and it would run. Turns out the wire leading into his amp gauge in the dash was loose. Once this connection was fixed everything worked fine. Battery held charge and it stopped stalling out.
Another I worked on ended up being a short in the wire to the tachometer. That would not necessarily account for your losing power with the headlights, but you could possibly have a couple of shorts or loose connections. Sort through all of the wiring, check grounds and make sure there is no dead short somewhere.
The LED's themselves should draw a fraction of what an old incandescent bulb will draw, so I don't think the lights themselves is the issue.