This took so long, I lost track of the hours. Probably well over 50, since I made a few errors as well as design changes while working, and was starting everything from scratch. Definately an evening hobby. I won't be making any more, sorry!
My car is undergoing a widebody build by Randy at BIC which is taking forever, so on-car pics will be another month or two away. I was inspired to make the LED pattern look long and wide to complement the new wide look of the car.
I spent about $300-$400 for parts, using the best quality brands available, since I never want to have to repair anything on these. Approx. 280 red, 120 amber and 36 white LED's were used, with one 27ohm resistor for each 5-LED array. For lots of details on retrofits and a great support community, sign up at
http://www.hidplanet.com/forums/ and check out the LED forum. The moderator AZDave was a huge help.
I like the defined look of the new tails on Inifity cars, so I opted to have the LED's right up to the lens, to keep the dots as small as possible. They emit a cone shaped beam and the dot on the lens gets bigger as you move the LED away. It would have been too hard to try to space them evenly if a more diffused pattern was wanted. Plus it would have bled light into the clear areas unless a complex chamber system was built in. There is certainly no room for that on the far edges where the clear bars are. I had to trim a bit even to fit my PCB board there.
Thanks for the compliments! I think its a pretty exciting result and will go well with the extreme theme of the widebody project.
Here's a basic wiring example provided by AZDave. I used the $10 PWM kit from Quickar.com