I believe they are there to direct light to the side and fan it out slightly. The side lenses are actually a series of stepped wedges- sort of like a Fresnel lens but instead of round, it is just a straight part. Funny enough, they also screw into the lens assembly. A few more pictures before I spit out some (free but probably lousy ideas). First, the entire lens assembly has a housing assembly inside of it along with the lenses for the two city lights:
The side lenses snap in front and are retained in the back by one screw each and can be easily removed:
The inner housing with the side lenses removed:
And finally, the lenses themselves:
I believe Kawasaki is using these lenses instead of running lights or marker lights. At first I thought that they were responsible for the 'tell tale' strips of light on the ground just to the side of the bike on each side (so you can tell if a headlight is working or not from the saddle) but there is a distinct spot in the upper reflector bowl that makes that light streak (and the slight burns in my right retina).
So two thoughts: I think you could get inside the headlight housing and put a strip of LEDs inside those lenses if you wanted to make them more like true marker lights (colored lights perhaps). Modern strip mounted, surface LEDs would lend themselves to that pretty easily. You could also make them strobe at a frequency just below the human eye's persistence of vision and get a tremendous 'make people look' effect (the stroking at the right speed triggers the rapid acceleration portion of the brain; we see the frequency as 'fight or flight' in an animal or human near us and instinctively look towards it. The effect is very pronounced and a little bit humorous because people do not know what they are looking at or even why they are looking (P.O.V. is far longer near the center range of the human eye so it is picked up by the peripheral vision but when looked at directly the lights are just ON steady).
The big problem is going to be how to get the lights in there. If you make a small hole behind the reflector bowls, near the edge where those lenses are, I believe you could slide a stick of LED on some type of self- adhesive tape, into the headlight and affix them to the inside of those lenses directly. Run the wires back and out of the housing and plug the hose with RTV sealant, dum dum or anything else applicable. I believe you can get enough tools and maybe a finger or two into the headlight housing through the H4 lamp hole to do this. You could also add a hole just above and / or below the wire hole to insert things like long screwdrivers to position the LEDs and then hold them in place with a bit of pressure.
If you cannot do that, then you are going to have to open the headlight housing. That is the bad news; the good news is that if you do open the housing you can do whatever you want in there as there is a lot of room and I think it will be easy to do trick things (such as the strobe effect). There is even room for a short word- perhaps five letters or so.... something like HONDA..... well, maybe not that word.
My projectors are winging their way right now along with D2s bulbs. The projectors and HID bulbs (burners) are actually OEM, the projectors Japanese out of an Acura (I have enough data on them that they do appear to have a wider, more uniform and the inboard portion is darker than the German equivalents). Normally I would have gone Hella but will try these on. Now they are huge and may not fit although a C-14 light housing is a pretty big thing itself so I do expect they can be persuaded to go. The bulbs are Phillips 122+ which are OEM on most all German projectors. I will cheat and use Chinese ballasts and igniters just because they work well, are reliable and are a lot less expensive than either Philips or Matsushita HID. They should be here this week.... he says as he rubs his hands together. :-)
Brian
Brian, while you are in there, I've always wondered what those 2 clear plastic multy step strips on either side were originally
designed to do. Maybe they're just silly decoration (very silly IMO), but they appear to be designed to do something that maybe was
abandoned by Mama Kaw. While you have it apart could you test/see if you were to put an LED or flashlight behind those
do they have any light pipe like side illumination properties? I'm sure I used the wrong optical tech terms there but I think
you know what I mean?
