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Well, I do not have a good salvage yard filled with old Volvos, so I went ahead and modded the 900 bulb with an LED. I first removed the glass bulb by cutting the wires attached to the base pins. After that the bulb just pulls out, it's not glued or anything. I then used a 0.25W 470 ohm resistor and a cheap white LED that is just the diameter of the old glass bulb. I bought something like 500 of these LEDs directly from Honk Kong for next to nothing ($10 shipped?!) a while back when I was doing an LED workshop with the local kids. I still have a lot of them laying around. They are pretty bright, but nothing like what you get in the flashlights these days. They tend to draw about 25-30 ma of current, so I figured 470 ohm resistor would take care of the voltage drop. 0.025A * 470ohm = 11.75V. Even when the car is not running and the voltage on the line is 12V the LED is nice and bright (I may be running it at even a lower current, I did not measure). It was not super easy to stuff the 0.25W resistor into the plastic base, but it's not impossible. I will get some pictures when I do the next set of bulbs. The ones I got now are already in the car. I could not resist trying them once I finished them and did not have the camera handy. Basically, I used a tiny screw driver heated up red hot to burn the holes for the wires of the LED since those are much thicker than the original bulb's leads. Long story short, it worked and it looks great, takes less energy, runs cold and will probably never burn out again. All for the cost of $0.30 at most and a half hour of my time. If I had access to 700 bases, I would convert to those, since it's probably even less work, but as it is I did it this way and I am pretty happy. Thanks for the idea! I will try to take pictures next batch and will post the process. This is probably going to be useful to many a 900 owner.
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Vladimir. '98 S70 base, 5-speed manual - his, '93 945 - hers
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