Car stereo stock radio fake-out

Step 3 Remove the LED display

Use a nutdriver and wire cutters to remove the LED display. The LED display behind the faceplate will add touch of realism to the finished product.

Be careful around the LED display. Mine was sandwiched between to tiny sheets of glass. I broke it in a couple of places, but was able to repair it using a little epoxy.

Comments

[puttsy]

(removed by author or community request)

[osgeld]

(removed by author or community request)

[puttsy]

(removed by author or community request)

[osgeld]

no hard feelings, it happens to all of us :)

[]

(removed by community request) Darn it community!!! Great Instructable, though.

[garydion]

Look at step 3, second picture. You can clearly see the hot cathode filaments. This is a vacuum fluorescent display - not an LCD.

You can learn about them here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_fluorescent_display

[scottredd]

Thanks for the education, garydion and osgeld. No doubt about it. This is a VFD. I will adjust the wording in the steps later to generalize references the display.

[osgeld]

yea thats most likely a vfd (segmented florescent, thats why you can read it in the sunlight:)) and for anyone else trying it might i suggest a dremel with a cut off wheel?

[ajmontag]

correct me if i'm wrong, but isn't that an LCD display, not an LED display??

[scottredd]

We're talking old school here. It is not an LCD, for sure. I suppose it could even be some sort of segmented neon light matrix. That might explain the glass components. There were really fine, hair-like wires connecting to parts of the display inside the glass.

[alex-sharetskiy]

if you tap it in a quite room, you can hear it hum. Nice & clever Instructable! Did you keep the Mobo from that player? Lots of resistors, capacitors, switches, diodes, Leds, and other goodies! i have a whole drawer of prited circuit boards, an when i need a componenet, i just look through all the parts on all the circuit boards to see if i can find one. I'm WAAAAYYY too cheap for radioshack!