Yup just bulbs, done. Gotta be a bit smart about what LED 1157s you buy, some cheap LED bulbs don't have great difference between tail and brake light intensity.
For taillights, you must use red LED lamps behind the red lens. Otherwise, you'll find the incandescent lamps brighter. I don't remember where or what I bought, but my XS11 has LED tail and signal lights. They are significantly brighter than the OE lamps.Yup just bulbs, done. Gotta be a bit smart about what LED 1157s you buy, some cheap LED bulbs don't have great difference between tail and brake light intensity.
Yeah LED with very short wavelength color bands are picky about making it through a filter.For taillights, you must use red LED lamps behind the red lens. Otherwise, you'll find the incandescent lamps brighter. I don't remember where or what I bought, but my XS11 has LED tail and signal lights. They are significantly brighter than the OE lamps.
I have them in the turn signals of the bike pictured above. It's an Eleven Special but similar enough to the XS650. My Eleven has a custom made flasher card for the no load lamps and to maintain the auto cancel. The XS650 signals will work fine with a no load flasher, but the auto-cancel feature will be rendered inoperative. The LED signals do not change speed with RPM. My XS650 is all stock. At idle, with the brake light on, my signal stops flashing. That means I need to disassemble the wiring connectors and clean all of them. My XS11 was behaving the same way. The LEDs cured it. I may put LED taillights in the 650 to keep the incandescent signals working for the time being.With the low draw of LED bulbs, do they do anything weird to our already sketchy electrical system? Has anyone tried them in the turn signals?
I forgot that there's an issue with the bikes that have the single lamp taillight. The LED can complicate things.The only issue I encountered with a LED brake/tail light on my '78 was it triggered the "Brake" warning light in my dash. Apparently the draw is so small the system thought it was burned out, lol. I "fixed" it at first by simply removing the bulb in the dash. Eventually I removed the light checker that triggers the bulb but being located between the battery box and the inner fender, that had to wait for the next time the rear wheel came off.
In that case, the stock headlight is all you need. The electrical system is designed to handle it. I find the stock headlight sufficient on any rare occasion I find myself out after dark. My XS1100 is stock with what I believe is H4. It's very bright and sufficient for riding at night.I plan on zero night riding.
You may encounter carb tuning issues with those K&N style pleated pod filters. They don't work well on these CV carbs. A CV carb relies on a smooth flow of air to smoothly lift the slide. The air flow through the pleats is somewhat "rough" and turbulent. Straight foam pods work best.
Try this test ..... in 2nd or 3rd gear, running along at around 3 to 3.5K RPMs, roll the throttle fully open and accelerate up to 5.5 or 6K RPMs. Watch for any break-up or stumbling. If you get some, this is most likely a phenomenon known as "slide flutter" caused by the turbulent air flow through your pleated pods. Slide flutter is just what it sounds like. Instead of lifting smoothly, the slide "flutters", bounces up and down rapidly. This is like rapidly opening and closing the throttle multiple times and the result is a stumble or break-up.