I've been wondering why Mitsubishi decided to make the cluster on the Evo orange on orange (which is terribly hard to read at night IMHO) and then make the rest of the lights in the car bluish white. While it doesn't really bother me much, I was thinking about color continuity a bit after having the dash open this weekend to look at the DIN/climate control setup. It was then that I noticed that the climate controls had a little blue backlight bulb.

I decided tonight to see if it would be possible to swap that light out to change the backlight color. At worst it was just a blue LED that I could de-solder and replace with some other color, like red or green. As luck would have it, it turns out there are really two lights in there, and they are simply small incandescent wedge bulbs with blue condoms over them. If you want to change the color of your backlighting you only need to replace the condom with a different color or paint the bulb.

Tools required: Pliers + soft cloth, philips head screw driver, small philips head screw driver.

Let's begin with a picture of the dash, how exciting!

 

Using those pliers and the soft cloth to protect the plastic, remove the three climate control knobs. You may be able to just pull them off by hand.

 

Remove the two screws, one under each big knob, so that you can pull off the panel. It has six clips holding it in, two above the radio and one at each corner. I simply pulled on one of the open bottom holes to pop a bottom corner out, then popped the other bottom corner out. From there I pried with my fingers to pop the top four out. It will take some force to pry the top four out.

With the console off you should see the single DIN and the climate controls. You can see one of the two blue LEDs at this stage.

 

Now you need to use the smal philips screw driver to unscrew those four screws holding on the clear plastic "light channel" thing and the 3 pushbuttons.

With those removed you'll uncover the second bulb. You'll also have easy access to pull the bulbs from their sockets.

 

Here's of the little wedge bulbs, popped from the socket. You can roll that blue condom off.

 

For my bulbs I happened to have some spare Autometer red condoms laying around. They're much bigger than the wedge bulbs here, so I just pushed them up into the holes in the plastic "light channel" so they would completely cover the wedge bulb once the plastic pieces were put back in. In this case they are large enough to create a "seal" with the circuit board and not allow any yellow light out.

 

Here's what blue LED's will look like instead of bulbs..

 

Let's turn the lights on to see how it looks so far. Notice how the clear plastic piece also provides backlighting for the three pushbuttons' text. The on/off indicator for those is supplied by a very small LED, the little clear blip to the left of each blue pad.

 

Now button everything up and you're done!

 

One last pic.

 

iodine you're a genious. good work!

 

Ever check behind the guage cluster to see if it's as easy
Good work. Hopefully I'll be doing a boost controller install guide soon. Gotta find the time.

 

Very nice work!! Does it match well with the guage cluster??

 

Thank you soo much!!!! I've been dying to find out to remove the AC controls, and I take it that this applies to the Lancer as well, since we have the same style AC controls??? Does autozone have those blue "condoms"??

 

blue condoms are the ones in it no, cause it glow's blue right' i can't wait to try this over the weekend on my OZ. I was thinking i was gonna have to take my whole front peice off but thanks to you i can do it in ten min's. good job man looks great..