One of the few gripes the wife and I have about our 2003 AV was that the Hi-Beam indicator light was nearly blinding at night. A week or so ago I started a thread asking if anyone had figured out how to fix it, and the reply basically came back as no, so this weekend I decided to see what I could come up with.
Someone had mentioned putting a current-limiting resistor in line with the light, but even for this electronics engineer, I was hoping to find something which had a lower risk of "screwing up something expensive". From a manufacturing engineering point of view, that would have been the preferred fix, doing either a redesign of the circuit board or doing a "cut and jumper" level of fix. But for me in the driveway tweaking mode, I wanted to try to find something cheap, easy, and with low chance of breaking anything in the process.
I removed the trim piece that surrounds the gauges, radio, H/AC, etc. It snaps into place, and was fairly easy to remove. It took me a while to realize the obvious, but you need to move the steering column all the way down and move the shift lever into the low gear position in order to remove the trim piece after getting it loose from the dash. There were 4 screws holding the gauges in place. After removing those screws, other than the wiring harness, the instrument package was free. The wiring harness had a snap-in fastener taped to it, and I pulled the fastener out of its socket to give me a little more room to work without unplugging the harness (which didn't seem obvious at first inspection how it could be unplugged).
The instrument package is a multi-decker sandwich assembly, with for lack of a better word, clips from the 2 outermost sandwich layers securing those layers to a middle layer. I unclipped the front layer, which basically removed the clear cover that we look through while driving. I lifted up the edge of the instrument face (it is fairly thin, about the thickness and stiffness of a business card) and looked at what was directly behind the hi-beam symbol that lights up with the hi-beams. The layer behind the instrument face was a 3-d plastic piece which separated the face from the circuit board holding the hi-beam indicator light and other circuitry. This 3-d piece was roughly a half-inch wide. To keep an indicator light from partially lighting up nearby idiot-light symbols, this 3-d piece had what amounted to "tunnels" between the idot lights on the circuit board and their associated symbology cutouts in the instrument face. I thought to myself what could I put over the face end of that "tunnel" to filter out a good deal of that light, but not too much of the light. As luck would have it, I think I stumbled onto something that is just about perfect, the first time I tried something. I had some bright blue (about the color of the hi-beam indicator light) electrical tape lying around the garage. I ripped off a piece of that and covered the face end of the "tunnel" with it. Since I hadn't unplugged the wiring harness, I could pull back the turn-signal switch to activate the hi-beams in their flash-to-pass mode and take a quick look at how bright the indicator was during daylight. It was clearly visible in the daylight, but seemed quite subdued. I put everything back together, and had a chance to test it out last night. To my eyes, it is just about perfect. It is clearly visible of course, but it is no longer impossible to ignore like it used to be, where you wanted to hold up your left hand in front of it so that it wasn't messing up your night vision.
Someone had mentioned putting a current-limiting resistor in line with the light, but even for this electronics engineer, I was hoping to find something which had a lower risk of "screwing up something expensive". From a manufacturing engineering point of view, that would have been the preferred fix, doing either a redesign of the circuit board or doing a "cut and jumper" level of fix. But for me in the driveway tweaking mode, I wanted to try to find something cheap, easy, and with low chance of breaking anything in the process.
I removed the trim piece that surrounds the gauges, radio, H/AC, etc. It snaps into place, and was fairly easy to remove. It took me a while to realize the obvious, but you need to move the steering column all the way down and move the shift lever into the low gear position in order to remove the trim piece after getting it loose from the dash. There were 4 screws holding the gauges in place. After removing those screws, other than the wiring harness, the instrument package was free. The wiring harness had a snap-in fastener taped to it, and I pulled the fastener out of its socket to give me a little more room to work without unplugging the harness (which didn't seem obvious at first inspection how it could be unplugged).
The instrument package is a multi-decker sandwich assembly, with for lack of a better word, clips from the 2 outermost sandwich layers securing those layers to a middle layer. I unclipped the front layer, which basically removed the clear cover that we look through while driving. I lifted up the edge of the instrument face (it is fairly thin, about the thickness and stiffness of a business card) and looked at what was directly behind the hi-beam symbol that lights up with the hi-beams. The layer behind the instrument face was a 3-d plastic piece which separated the face from the circuit board holding the hi-beam indicator light and other circuitry. This 3-d piece was roughly a half-inch wide. To keep an indicator light from partially lighting up nearby idiot-light symbols, this 3-d piece had what amounted to "tunnels" between the idot lights on the circuit board and their associated symbology cutouts in the instrument face. I thought to myself what could I put over the face end of that "tunnel" to filter out a good deal of that light, but not too much of the light. As luck would have it, I think I stumbled onto something that is just about perfect, the first time I tried something. I had some bright blue (about the color of the hi-beam indicator light) electrical tape lying around the garage. I ripped off a piece of that and covered the face end of the "tunnel" with it. Since I hadn't unplugged the wiring harness, I could pull back the turn-signal switch to activate the hi-beams in their flash-to-pass mode and take a quick look at how bright the indicator was during daylight. It was clearly visible in the daylight, but seemed quite subdued. I put everything back together, and had a chance to test it out last night. To my eyes, it is just about perfect. It is clearly visible of course, but it is no longer impossible to ignore like it used to be, where you wanted to hold up your left hand in front of it so that it wasn't messing up your night vision.
