The NC23 has some aftermarket gadget that does two things: it turns the brake light of the twin tail lights into turning lights, and it makes the brake light blink. I guess the idea is that blinking the brake light makes it more visible. However, it blinks pretty fast and bulbs are slow to turn on. The end result is that the bulb never gets to maximum brightness and the brake light isn’t particularly visible at all.

I’ve been thinking for a while that if I could find rings of LEDs and mount them in the tail light, those would make the flashing much more noticeable. Well, something made me think of this a couple weeks ago and searching on ebay resulted in finding 50mm rings of red LEDs for 8 bucks. Not much to argue with!

You never know what you’re getting with these chinese LEDs, but I was pleasantly surprised. They are quite bright. Mounting them in the tail lights turned out to be a breeze, they fit almost perfectly around the bulb hole and a little RTV holds them fine:

This is the disassembled tail light with the two LED rings mounted around the bulb holes.

After reassembling the tail light and splicing some connectors onto the wires going to the brake light bulbs, it worked pretty well. The flashing is certainly much more “sharp” than it used to. It doesn’t come out well on camera, but I tried to make a youtube:

Since the same flashing is used for the turn signals, those are also more noticeable, although that’s mostly academic since I’ve already added dedicated, yellow, turn signals that attach to the license plate. I read that integrated turn signals are unlikely to pass the Hawaii safety inspection, so I figured I might as well fix them right away. Unlike some people, I don’t find turn signals unsightly.