I finally finished the LED light upgrade by installing a turn signal flasher module built for LED’s. Because LED’s take less power in order to generate light, the OEM flasher module would not work correctly, and would not flash the lights. I purchased one for about $10 off of eBay, and it was a plug and play 2 pin design for the OEM wiring harness of my bike. The lights are quite a bit brighter than the OE bulb lights that came with the bike. It should also reduce some power consumption, which means I can install a lightbar and some pod lights, and other cool things if I so choose. Lights take quite a bit of power to use, and switching to LED’s does reduce power consumption quite a bit. Now, the only thing really consuming power is the ignition system, which takes quite a bit of amperage to fire the spark plug. However there really is no way to fix that issue without completely reengineering the whole ignition system, which is just not worth it on a little dual sport like the TW. Another benefit is that LED’s just run physically cooler than traditional bulbs. I have had issues with traditional bulbs literally melting the plastic of my lights when the weather was too hot. My Honda Shadow has some melted turn signals because the bulbs were literally generating too much heat. Even in the pictures below, running the standard bulbs for about 2-3 minutes generated enough heat to make it too hot to pull the bulbs out without wearing a glove.
Standard brake light.
LED brake light.
Standard turn signal.
LED turn signal.
The pictures aren’t great because taking pictures of low light conditions with a low quality digital camera sucks, but I think you can tell that LED lights generate quite a bit more light than standard bulbs do.
I also changed the dash lights to LED’s. All of the old bulbs were broken, and I have zero interest in purchasing new ones just to demonstrate the change in brightness. Not that I really care all that much for the dash lights, as I changed them for the durability, rather than the brightness factor. I did change the speedometer to a red LED, which I think would be cool, especially if I ever decide to install a blackout switch.