Meter4it Engineering , Sequential / Chase taillights for Ford Mustang

Where imagination, appeal, and technology collide placing you in control.

Promoting the use of turn signals one car at a time!

This was performed on a Ford Ranger truck with a fiberglass tunnel cover .

AVI video:

Ranger with Chase 108kb

Ranger Chase shown at different angles day time. 1.62mb

Ranger Chase shown with different angles night time. 478kb

This is my nephews Ranger. As with the Project F-150 Super Crew I will try and provide all the information that I have to better explain the process and to help you if you would like to duplicate this for your car or truck.

Please note that I do not supply LED's or PCB's for this, only the Sequential / Chase unit and the proper wiring of the Sequential / Chase unit. You must know the color of the wires on your car or truck that provide Left and Right turn signal, Ground, and a 12Vdc power.

This started out because my brother wanted to add the Sequential / Chase to his Ford truck. Now on this web page I will show you how we installed the Sequential / Chase unit on the Ford Ranger. Well, as you know trucks usually only have 1 light bulb per side. We must add more lights! We could modify the original taillight but this would give other problems like one light shining onto the next one canceling out the effect, this is because there is no divider in the taillight housing. Another one would be to build an LED (Light Emitting Diode) array that would go inside of the factory taillight, to much work. We finally decided that the tunnel cover would be the best place. Now what type of light to use? We did not want to change the look of the truck as to draw attention until the lights were on. Thought about trailer lights but they are to big and well, ugly for this application. We like LED's because they are bright, they don't draw much current, OK we don't care about that! The one down side is that they are directional ( most LED's only have a 15 degree viewing angle). We thought if we get 5mm diffused LED's basically the whole LED would light up and give us 180 degree of light. Well, one thing with diffused LED's is that they are not bright enough. I found some flat top LED's that give a 120 degree of viewing and that are very bright.

As with the F-150 SuperCrew we used a guild my brother made on a vertical milling machine. The holes were spaced 10mm apart, center of one LED to the center of the next LED. Jerry used 3 rows of 30 for the guide. With this we could use 3 rows, 2 rows or 1 row, depends on space and what looks best. Also could make chevron design <<< >>>. As you can see we used 2 rows of the template for a total of 60 LED's per side.

Now the PCB (Printed Circuit Board) to hold the LED's. After bring myself up to speed on LED's and learning some new things on the proto board I was ready to designed the circuit board using Eagle CAD software. NOTE: I wanted the LED's to not only turn on for the Brake and Turn Signal but to work for Parking lights too. I decided to use three PCB's per side. Each one would hold 2 rows of 10. After printing the PCB on to "Press-n-peel" (Purchased from Techniks.com) I ironed them to copper clad boards then etched them and then drilled the holes ( a bunch of holes I should say). OK I'm not going into a lot of detail because the internet has a wealth of information on PCB making.

The PCB's provide Turn signal and Parking lights (running lights) by sharing LED's. The Parking lights are about half as bright as the Turning lights. We chose not to use the The Parking lights on this application and to disable the factory Brake and Turn signal lights in the Factory taillight. This is pretty neat, at night you only see the factory taillights (running lights) and when you apply the brake or turn signal, it's a surprise to the driver behind you and then he notices the Chase pattern. Pretty cool I must say.

As you can see the template has three rows but we chose to use only two rows.

Each PCB has 20 Red LED's. We used three PCB's (60 LED's) per side for a total of 120 LED's both sides. A lot of drilling!

Here are some pictures of the PCB with just the diodes, resistors and PCB with LED's. The picture on the right is with the LED's of one PCB inserted into the holes of the tunnel cover.

Below you can see the PCB's in place and wired up for testing.

This is some finished pictures.

Another thing we had to do was to modify the flashers rate of flashes per minute.

We added the black capacitor to slow things down (Must match polarities of capacitors). Picture shown above provided over a 2 second delay, way to much. Although I don't have a picture of the final capacitor arrangement we ended up with 5uf total for capacitance. This gave us around 1 second delay, life is good! NOTE: We has to recalibrate the Sequential / Chase unit via the Calibrate button, no sweat there.

One last thing is were we tapped into the factory wiring harness to get the Left, Right Turn signals and Parking lights. I have no picture so I will tell you. The tunnel cover pivots at the back of the cab so we ran the three wires to the front of the bed along the inside top of the tunnel cover. Down to a rubber plug continuing to the drivers side frame were the factory wiring harness happens to be. After removing the electrical tape we soldered connections to (Light Green / Orange strip for left) and (Orange / light Blue strip for right).

This is a picture of the PCB, you could take this and make a PCB using "Press N Peel".