Reply to "Gauge led bulbs"

You guys are assuming the stock rheostat is working as it should. It may well not be; quite a few have failed utterly and it seems reasonable that others are not fully functional. Inside the Rheostat is a curved wound-wire potentiometer and a thin copper strip that has a ball bearing running on it to make contact without wear. The key issue is, ALL electrical power goes through a 1/2" long hair-fine wire that often breaks from old age.

And you don't even need to disassemble the thing like I did. On the back of the stock rheostat are a pair of stubs that if bridged, will parallel the feed thru that hair-wire inside and restore full function. With a BIG soldering iron, I soldered a 12-ga. bridge-wire across those visible stubs and my non-functional rheostat now works fine. If a VOM shows less than 5 ohms- or open- thru your rheostat (or maybe even if it does show correct resistance) I suggest bridging those contacts before trying other add-ons.