Kawasaki you tubes

Or, disabling the parking light function on my Kawasaki.

For not the first time in the last few years I rushed out in between torrents of refreshing rain for a quick go on my KLR650  only to find I was going nowhere due to the parking light feature-ette (If you turn the ignition key one click past "lock" it puts on the parking lights, which you can't see in the daytime but can pointlessly and pathetically illuminate the inside of your garage while voraciously draining every last bit of precious life from your battery)

I hate you.

Clearly what is required is tools and science. 


Here's the science:

Wiring. How does that work?

The Red/White (R/W) wire is the interesting one - follow it and it supplies power to the front and rear lights. According to the "Ignition Switch Connections" table, it gets this power either from the White wire (which comes more or less directly from the battery) in the "Park" position or the Red wire (this comes from the left hand switchgear light switch) which is powered only with the ignition on.

So the bad stuff comes from the white wire but I can't touch that because that kind of powers the whole bike. Instead, I need to cut the R//W wire where it comes away from the ignition switch so that it cannot be powered from that any more, then connect it directly to the Red wire so it can get power from there (it's important for the parking lights to work, I use them all the time :\ ).

Now to get the tools out...

Remarkably Rust-free.

First thing with any bike job is to remove some plastic bits. Luckily it's only the two screws on each side of the headlight cowl above - made much easier because I've replaced the ones made of cheese with decent fasteners.

Remarkably neat.

I expected the usual knot of fragile wires behind the cowl but instead found this very tidy row of connectors. The middle connector in this row of five is the one that features in the wiring diagram above. 

Remarkably easy. Photo does not show red/white wire hiding behind heatshrink.

Behind the dust boot are the expected wires. I did want to pull the pins with wires intact from the connector to make this somewhat reversible, but a few prods made it clear that this wasn't going to happen without something been broken and possibly blood loss. So I cut the two wires as shown then made a joint between them on the loom side with solder and heat shrink -- I would have preferred to use my fancy crimp tool but there was no chance of getting it into the available space.

tl:dr - Cut both the Red and Red/White wires, then join them together.

And that all works as planned - Sidelights now come on with the handlebar switch but not with the ignition key.