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Thanks for the reply. I suspect my friend will need to not buy them if the seller won't respond to the question.

A friend of mine in Japan has a sweet restored 96 Cobra and wants to run a set of FR500 wheels on it. In Japan, car wheels must have a DOT stamp on them before the government will allow them to be run on a car. It would be bad if he were to buy a set, have them shipped to Japan and then find...

Thanks! Glad to hear that the Speedhut solution is still working after years. I was a little worried that the higher frequency might be bad for the panel, but your evidence suggests it isn't. The lower voltage may actually make te panels last even longer. Who knows. Good news though.

In my opinion, if you can see the pulsing, then the frequency will be way to low to cause any damage to the EL panel.

That's a good point. Dimming the cluster will reduce the peak-to-peak voltage which should help to extend the life of your cluster. How much it would help, I have no idea, but it sure can't hurt.

Those panels were custom made for Ford. I can't see how anyone could adapt a generic EL panel to work. :(

Sold.

I do.

Time for an update. I have actually been doing a lot of work on this project in spite of not having any more failed inverters to analyze. To recap, I have been able to diagnose 3 bad clusters. Two had bad EL panels and one had a blown inverter. It is easy to diagnose a bad panel. If you...

SOLD! I have had this Standard Range Speedcal in my lab for many years. I used it many years ago in my lab to make sure that my T56 lockout unit would work with a Speedcal in the car and it has been collecting dust since then. It was sold to me by a guy who got it from Dallas Mustang in 2003...

I have only seen one bad one so far. It had an open circuit in one of the transformer windings. There was no external signs that anything had failed. Other failures may be visible, I don't know yet. Another reason I want to see some more failed units.

I want to learn what naturally causes them to fail. Forcing a failure wouldn't tell us anyting. I was suspecting that the transistor would be the thing to fail, but so far, I have only seen one transformer fail. Unfortunately, I have been unable to source a compatible transformer. You should...

That is really good to know. I wonder if the inverters are about the same size...

Unfortunately, they simply get dimmer as they age. This is what I got from an EL supplier's web site: Unlike conventional lamps, EL lamps will not burn out. There is no filament to break or gas to escape as with LED’s. They do lose some of their brightness over time. Lamp life is related to...

I just finished working on a couple of clusters that were sent to me, a cluster from the guy's car and a donor cluster plus a spare Glowhut inverter. It turned out that all 3 inverters were fully functional. The EL panel from his car was dead, but the EL panel from the donor cluster was...

Here is a wiring harness writeup I did to help people do this swap: https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/1975f84f-4935-4131-8404-5a914da1afb7/downloads/03Into96SwapR1-5.pdf?ver=1572411496489 Here is a document I wrote to describe the Terminator vacuum diagram...

Yes. 12V square wave with one pulse per ignition event.

The inverter is only in the 03 and 04 Cobra or 02 to 03 or 04 Lightning clusters as far as I know. It isn't in any other vehicles that I know of. You have to take the cluster apart and look for about a 1" cube, open on 3 sides with a circuit board that looks like this:

Not yet. Still hoping.

If you don't want your car to be down while this is going on, you can take your cluster out, open it up, remove the inverter and put it all back together and back into the car. The cluster will work exactly the same without the inverter as it did with the inverter and/or EL panel already not...

Thanks for the positive feedback. I am still standing by for some inverters to work on...

Yes. The more that I can diagnose, the more likely it will be that I can figure out how to fix them. PM sent.

Cobra_Clark98 told me that the reason the fuse wasn't blown on the Lightning inverter was because he had replaced it in an attempt to fix the inverter.

Thanks to Cobra_Clark98 (from a different forum), who sent me his 2002 Lightning cluster with a definitely blown inverter, I have learned that the similar vintage Lightnings use the same inverter to drive their EL panels. He also shared some Lightning forum posts that showed me that what I had...

I have developed schematics as far as I can without taking the components off of the PCB. The resistor numbers I chose may not match the numbers on the PCB since I can read them with the components in place. Here are the schematics as far as I have gotten: (EDIT: Updated to R2.0) Based on...