| Author | Message | ||
     Lrholy06 |
I took the bike out today after charging the battery on trickle over night. When I started it up the display on the IC kept flickering on and off and between those it would read system voltage. On the ride to the gas station I kept the rpms high but it kept going in and out of power causing the bike to surge and the IC to go off and on. This also with the needle dying off and sitting at zero for a ways and then shooting up to normal and then back to dead. After filling up the bike the display went completely dead. Odd thing was, that it started and after revving it up and pulling out of the gas station with no display at all, it came back on. I took it up to speed and through all the gears. The voltage on the display reading between 14.7 and 15.2 the whole time but with everything flickering and cutting out including the battery light. It seems to idle just fine with no flickering and no battery light. All in all not a very comfortable ride but is this what all of you that have had stator problems went through? | ||
| Froggy |
14.7-15.2 volts is too high, and is a sign that your voltage regulator may be failing. | ||
| Timebandit |
Indeed, those voltage measurements you noticed are too high. Something is amiss. The high voltages and a bad regulator don't adequately explain your problem though. Your bike is behaving as if it's having low DC voltage starvation (inadequate DC voltage to run the instrument cluster, injectors, surging), while at the same time you're observing high voltages on the voltmeter. This tells me to look at your battery. You mentioned it was on the trickle charger. Have you recently had problems with it? The stock shunt regulator produces a rather choppy voltage output. The waveform is markedly smoothed out by a properly functioning battery. With a good battery, you may notice smooth DC with 0.7 volts of ripple. With no battery load to smooth out the system, the charging system output will be 15 volt spikes on top of 0 VDC. It sounds like you've got a charging system that's acting like there's no battery. The first thing that I would do would be to pull the battery, put it on a full overnight charge (not a trickle, not a tender) and perform a load test on the battery. While that's happening, I'd also run through the charging system tests in the service manual to get a look at the vreg and stator. | ||
| Duphuckincati |
If that's the original battery it could easily be dying of old age. And from my first-hand experience when the stator starts to go you'll get an occasional check engine light, then check engine and the electrics light. Volts will then start dropping. Head for home or someplace to re-charge along the way if needed. | ||
| Zac4mac |
If you stator fails - BTW your R/R is dying Lrholy. Stop, leave the motor running, disconnect your headlights at the harness. Pray Head HOME If you can't make it, bungee a car battery to the passenger seat and hook it to the battery. You will get home. Z | ||
| Pwillikers |
Follow this guide and you can readily determine the fault. http://www.electrosport.com/media/pdf/fault-findin g-diagram.pdf | ||
| Lrholy06 |
Thanks for all the input guys. I just find it hard to believe that this has all happened over night. I have never had any problems with the stator/regulator/battery before. I was having an issue with the fuel pump, I changed that out and took it for a ride and this is what I get. The only reason I charged the battery is because I thought it was dead from changing the fuel pump as the bike sat for a couple of weeks. Oh ya and I checked the battery with my voltmeter this morning and it still reads about 12.7, which is where it has usually been at in the past. | ||
| Timebandit |
> "I find it hard to believe that this happened overnight." i have a few comments. some might seem rambling and non-applicable now that we know that you were working on the electrics, but i'll throw them out just for the sake of completeness: i'm sure you know that measuring the resting battery voltage isn't going to give you the complete picture on battery health. to verify that a battery is good you need to do a full charge and a load test. battery problems can/do happen "overnight." a short is an event that occurs immediately -- battery is good one minute and bad the next. if your battery had a cell fail open circuit, it could cause the kind of problems you were observing on the ride -- failing DC voltages and intermittent IC dropout, with peak regulator voltage spikes of 15.x volts intermittently displaying on the instrument cluster. but a shorted cell battery's voltage wouldn't be 12.x volts. that's not the problem. the 12.x volt observation suggests that the battery is not shorted out. for you to observe symptoms of intermittent DC supply voltages with an adequate DC power supply, you have to have a loose/bad connection somewhere. > "I was having an issue with the fuel pump, I changed that out and took it for a ride and this is what I get." whoa! now we have a key piece of information that was left out before -- that you were working on the bike's electrical system, and that things failed immediately afterward. it really helps to know that. if I understand correctly, the electrical problem came up immediately after you did the work on the fuel pump? if that's the case then i'd re-check your electrical connections. probability is working against acute failure of the charging system. a loose wire/bad connection seems more likely. chances are that you've got an easy problem to fix once you find it. | ||
| Craigsmoney |
I've heard of the IC actually being bad. I'd check connections, and put a voltage meter on the battery to see what it actually is. |
