I put blue LED lights in my instrument cluster recently, and had to remove them because my tach needle wouldn't illuminate. Also, the brightness contrasted from side to side (half the speedo was nice and bright, and half was barely illuminated). Any suggestions? Or has anyone done this themseves and had a similar problem and fixed it?

 

I haven't opened up my cluster on my Camaro but I have done plenty of LED work. LED's tend to have very focused light. They do not really disperse light like a bulb would.

One possible solution is to sand the LED's just enough to make them look frosted. I used my wife's nail file all around it, really makes a difference.

Another possible solution is to put in more LED's so that they are practically behind every inch that needs to be lit up.

The problem with the second option is that it will get tedious very quickly but the results are much better.

For the cluster on my old car I opted to go with a 5 LED bulb where 1 LED shoots light forward and the other 4 LED's light up radially. Came out pretty nice.

Below is a pic of my old car's interior with full LED mods in the cluster, radio, A/C controls, etc.

 

yeah, LED's tend to light up very brightly directly in front of where they are, and not very well to the sides like a traditional bulb would. I actually ordered some LED's from Ryan Macewean but they were out and when he called and told me that, he suggested that it would be better to go with regular bulbs because they spread the light out much more evenly than an LED would, even their cluster LED's.

 

I ended up going to www.superbrightLEDs.com and they had some wide-angle LEDs. They work great. Nice even light over the whole cluster.