All LED tailights sold as inoperative; I could not repair

[Hpwr]

Hello all,

Just bought a couple of Truck-Light "OmniVolt" all LED Stop / Turn / Blackout lights from an eBay vendor. Believe they fit the Hummer and M35 series, etc. Anyway no problem with the vendor who I've bought a lot of stuff from & been very pleased.

I have a background in electronics and thought I might be able to repair these units....NO WAY! they are glued together and also potted so you can't get to the guts without destroying them.

Funny thing was both of them didn't have taillight / stoplight functions, but the one I tore to peices investigating how they are put together; the taillight / stoplight function started working after i had beat them to @&*P out of itgetting it apart; unfortunately it would never go back together again.

There was absolutely no way I could get them dissasembled without destroying them.

My OPFWIW

Hpwr
Knoxville TN

 

[PETE BALLARD]

Don't know what you have,but i have seen some trucklite products are polarity sensative - especially in lighting

 

[goldneagle]

I have bought stuff from this seller before. He sells junk for top dollar-in my opinion. He still has this BS disclaimer on his auctions " I do this as a HOBBY not a business, so, therefore, my normal job takes precedence. IF you have to have your item next day or expect me to take a ration of &^%$ from you for not shipping on day or day after of payment, PLEASE LOOK ELSEWHERE. ..." He has over 14.4K feedbacks. I have been doing Ebay full time for 4 years and including my past feedbacks I don't even have 4K rating score. How can someone do that kind of volume part time? Rant off!

 

[Flyingvan911]

Thanks for the info. I was curious what it might take to fix them. Looks like they can't be. I have seen the listings many times before.

 

[3dAngus]

He's one of my favorite vendors, as with many of our SS folks here. He manages to get a lot of really interesting stuff.
For what it's worth, we've been informed before, the LED lights are not repairable, on multiple occasions on this board.
He sells them as inoperable. Combine that with non repairable, and you get a Christmas tree ornament, but only if your wife doesn't find out.
Sorry you lost your money, but if you're like me, it's fun to have one just to tinker with and see what makes it work. Neat stuff.

 

[goldneagle]

He's one of my favorite vendors, as with many of our SS folks here. He manages to get a lot of really interesting stuff.
For what it's worth, we've been informed before, the LED lights are not repairable, on multiple occasions on this board.
He sells them as inoperable. Combine that with non repairable, and you get a Christmas tree ornament, but only if your wife doesn't find out.
Sorry you lost your money, but if you're like me, it's fun to have one just to tinker with and see what makes it work. Neat stuff.

$40 to just tinker? We used to get them for $35 new (if I remember correctly) from a member here on SS. Got 2 pairs. One for the M109 and the 2nd went on the M923.

 

[NDT]

I've bought mountains of stuff from him. I no longer have time to dig through the Ft Hood scrap so I am glad he does it for us.

 

[3dAngus]

$40 to just tinker? We used to get them for $35 new (if I remember correctly) from a member here on SS. Got 2 pairs. One for the M109 and the 2nd went on the M923.

$40??? Really. Well, hey, I didn't say I would pay $40 to tinker.

I would pay $40 for new though.

 

[juanprado]

I bought 2 from him just to get the led buckets and the extra pigtail for the ground on each light. The new ones I purchased did not have the short ground wire with the ring terminal and packard connector. The 2 I got complete were $25. I never tried the lights, not sure what i was going to do with them except strip and cut the female wiring ends?

 

[goldneagle]

I bought 2 from him just to get the led buckets and the extra pigtail for the ground on each light. The new ones I purchased did not have the short ground wire with the ring terminal and packard connector. The 2 I got complete were $25. I never tried the lights, not sure what i was going to do with them except strip and cut the female wiring ends?

Since the ground wire goes to the mounting screws anyway, i would have taken the military connector off the wire and attached a ring terminal. You have to remove the 2 bolts to take out the light so you don't need the inline plug for the ground.

 

[Hpwr]

First off let me make it perfectly clear that I have no issues with the vendor; I've had many many transactions with him (probably over 30) and always been well satisfied. Most were for cables, speakers, and antenna mounts and or antenna parts. I agree that his prices are not always the best, but have always been reasonable to me (afterall I bought from him; he didn't call me selling) I've gotten some very good deals on some things, and I live in Tennessee not close to any military operation where surplus is sold. Regarding repair of the lights; I assumed they were sealed up, but wasn't expecting the potting / encapusulating compound; that and how they are assembled, are what makes them impossible to get apart for repair.....live and learn!

BTW, the inside of these lights are pretty sophisticated, much more so than I assumed; under the raised sqaure area on the back is an electronic circuit board with multipled active devices (Transistor switches, possible regulator devices, etc) and a whole plethora of passives (Capacitors, Resistors, Diodes, and what appear to be Varistor diodes)

Anyway; just wanted to make it clear that I don't have, and have never had any issues with the vendor. Caveat emptor as they say.

Hpwr
1962 M37B1

 

[steelandcanvas]

I remember, back in the day, when you could repair a lighting unit for about a dollar. I just replaced the lamp and not the whole fixture, ahhh those were the days.

 

[papakb]

Gentlemen,

These lights are Light Emitting Diodes and are definitely polarity sensative as any diode is. The harness will make sure you get + voltage to the connectors but without good grounds the lights won't work. Something else people tend to forget is that you need to ground BOTH mounting bolts. The LEDs are on seperate circuits and don't ground thru the same pin. This was always a headache with the old lamps. For whatever reason the government never spec'd that all lights or LEDs ground thru a single bolt. The early M series trucks with the composite lights used to have a small brass plate that made sure both mounting bolts got a good ground and when it was left off the problems began.


I gave a fiend a couple of BA9s LEDs for his turn signal indicator and neither one worked in his 151. Both worked fine in mine. It turned out that the lamp socket in the directional control was wired backwards from mine. Didn't make a difference to an incandescent lamp but it sure did to an LED.

Kurt

 

[Hpwr]

Papakb,

The LED light fixtures I wrote about in this thread only have one ground connection; all wiring coming out of these fixtures have the rubber female circuit protector with male push together Packard(?) type pins. The wiring is completely independant of the metalic mounting bucket and just passes thru an oversize hole in the back of the bucket. The actual light fixture wiring (5 lines) come out of the sealed polycarbonate light fixture itself (the polycarbonate fixture is completely or electrically isolated from the metallic mounting bucket) and the ground connection (only one) is identified; the other 4 connections are as follows,

1 wire for the single blackout light function at the very bottom of the fixture; this function worked.

1 wire for the double blackout light function in the bottom half of the fixture; this function worked.

1 wire for the taillight or regular running-light function at the top half of the fixture; this function did not work.

1 wire for the regular stoplight functionat the top half of the fixture; this function did not work.

As I previously stated I knew these were LED light fixtures and with my electronics backgroud (over 30 years actively employed in electronics maintenance and design fields) I am very familiar with LED circuits of all types.

Hpwr
1962 M37B1