Hi there,

How easy are these illuminated buttons kits to remove? I've had my empeg for about three years now. It came with two original NewFace fascias; one in silver, the other black.

I have a set of Black and Translucent buttons, the translucent ones are currently on with the illuminated buttons kit behind.

I'm thinking of selling one (or possibly both) of my NewFace fascias, not decided yet. If I keep the black one, I'd be tempted to remove the LED kit to sell with the Silver fascia and translucent buttons.

Is this a trivial mod to reverse? The black buttons don't want to fit with the kit in place...

Any help, much appreciated.

If you're already an expert at safely soldering and desoldering teeny tiny size-of-a-flea surface mount components, then yeah, it's trivial to remove.

But if you've never done that kind of thing before, no, it's completely nontrivial and you risk permanently damaging the display board.

The other issue is your stated desire to re-sell the illumination kit. After you remove the kit, the LEDs might not be easily installable into a new player, and the resistor pack might be completely blobbed up and nearly impossible to re-install.

Installing the LEDs depends on being able to stick all the way through the display board and then you can solder the long legs in place and clip off the excess. If you pull off the LEDs, then you might not be able to put them in a new player because you don't have the leg-length to put them through the new board. But... the LEDs are cheap and they aren't the tricky part of the kit anyway. You could buy a set of new LEDs for the new owner. The resistor pack is similar: You could just order a new one for the new owner.

Ah, well, that wouldn't be me so I'd best not mess with that then!!!

Would it be trivial (and more importantly, safe) to simply remove the LEDs so that the standard (or black) buttons will fit again, leaving whatever other associated wiring in situ? Obviously taking care to insulate the wiring where the LEDS were to prevent them shorting?

Thanks for the advice.

You can just snip off the LEDs at the leads if you really don't want to try unsoldering them. Not very nice though and if you ever did want to redo it then you'd have the hassle of unsoldering the left over leads.

I'm not sure what's preventing the buttons from fitting in your case, but if it's the tops of the LEDs, you may be in luck. I ground down the tips of my LEDs with a dremel to make my illuminated buttons fit better. Maybe that's all yours needs.

My experience is that LEDs are like cat's claws: You can grind away quite a bit of the tips without hurting the important bits at the base. looking at this picture you see that the actual diode bit is more than half way down from the top. That whole top section is just solid colored plastic, it's not hollow like a light bulb. I'd bet you could grind away 20-30 percent of the top of your typical LED and it would still work fine. (That's what I did on my button LEDs and they still work fine).

Thanks for the quick replies guys, I'll take a closer look but grinding them down might be the way!

Or you might offer to swap display boards with whoever is buying the NewFace...