Greetings!

Well, I have just completed the illuminated button hack on my primary player, Traveller. I would like to thank the following people:

Mark: Installation of the kit - I still can't see how a human could solder that stuff!!!
Brian: For developing and making the kit and the way cool smoke (and other) buttons!!!
DarkStorm: For the great smoke lens that matches the car perfectly!!!
Rob V.: For the excellent wood fascia!!!

As you can tell, very little of the original face is left, and I did very little of the actual work...

In any case. The smoke buttons combined with the smoke lens are great. The smoke buttons look almost black in indoor / standard lighting. Under bright conditions, they have an almost amber cast to them. Imagine clear glass streaked with tar (think about some of those non-smoking ads, and you get the idea). When lit, the VFD has the same blue/green very common with VFD dashboards. The buttons are an almost white, but with a smokey look from the buttons, giving a rather nice effect.

Unfortunately, the digital camera I use did not get the colors right, and I do not have access to better at the moment. For a general idea, the following shots were taken from a flatbed scanner. Primitive, but it gives some idea of what it would look like in bright light.

First, the displays - before and after. It is very hard to see the milky white LEDs in the button sockets, but they are there. The ring around the knob is now a four LED model. More symmetrical, very nice!



The empeg itself is quite nice, with the wooden fascia. The brightness of the flatbed scanner washes out the display and illumination greatly - I would think this the equivalent of very bright sunlight. It is much brighter in real life, room light or darkness, but I have not been able to capture it well with the equipment I have here at the moment. Tony's shot comes very close, but the VFD is much more VFD blue/green / cyan than it shows.