Bongo Fury

Hi all, new here. I was wondering if any one has taken apart their rear LED break light bar before? I have taken mine apart as it wasn’t working and and found that, what I believe to be a resistor inside the sealed housing is the culprit. The only issue is it doesn’t look like any other resistor I’ve seen!! The coloured bands make no sense. There is a thick red band and thin red band, but I have no idea how this relates to fuse colour banding. They should all be the same thickness and at least 3 bands.

The shape is very strange and thought this must be due to over heating and then deforming, but then thought it might be some type of diode instead? But didn’t think a diode made much sense in this location. I will attach a picture. If any one can tell the what the component is and it’s electrical value I can simply swap it out. many thanks in advance!

Yes that looks like either diode or a current regulator device, often difficult to tell the exact function but its not a resistor for certain.

Cheers Geoff, I always thought a static regulator was a resistor? And a voltage regulator has a variability built in? So are you thinking more diode?

There are constant current regulators available most often as three pin packages so you can set your own current level, but there are also 2-pin types for fixed levels, often used for LED chains as you want constant brightness, in some cases the regulators are built into the LED die itself and then you can add extra LED's in series. Most of these tend to be in flat pack style but I have seen a couple in the past which were in 2-pin barrel style.
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=led+c ... regulators

Ah ok I see. Very interesting. The problem is I can’t seem to find any that look like this one online. Would you have any idea where I could find one?

A quick Google image search gets a match.
This looks identical https://www.reddit.com/r/AskElectronics ... ent_diode/
A possible replacement https://www.vishay.com/docs/86061/sf5400.pdf

Wow… ain’t that clever.!
Good job g8

Wow! Awesome results Geoff!! Thank you so much. Il have to learn the Google image search function! Will see what else I can find. Thanks again for the help my friend!