anyone see this ever?

djsin

Lily's Daddy
Registered
Randy (mr bogus) came up to ride with me and one of my friends the other day....after an hour or so my bike dies...dead battery(was brand new 3 weeks ago) Randy and I both have those quick plugs to connect up a battery tender so I wired mine backwards and we used his bike to charge my battery for 5 minutes and I was able to get it home....the next day I went looking for the problem....what I found was a severely melted plug where the rectifier plugs into the bikes harness..from what I can tell the ground wire got hot(probably from a bad or lose connection) and melted the plug making the bike no longer charge.... the interesting part is...I took all the spade terminals out of both sides of the plug and proceeded to take readings with a voltmeter...everything checked out fine..both on the rectifier and on the stator...so I cut back and stripped the wire for the melted ground(B/W in picture)...it was copper on one side of the plug and tin on the other...BINGO 2 dissimilar metals + bad connection+corrosion= melt...I soldered the wires back together(all 5 circuits) and heat shrinked them and then tapped them ...took measurements on the battery with bike running...all is good now...interesting is the bike charges the battery better at idle then it does at 5k rpm...Im assuming cause the bikes own power needs are greater then the output of the stator...but reads between 14.4 and 14.8 no matter what rpm its at....manual says up to 15.1 is ok....anyone else have a similar problem ever?

sorry for the long read

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Could be a number of things like a bad connection between the spades in the connector causing arcing etc. Have had that problem before with other bikes, and removed the plug, soldered and heat shrank the connections. Also, clean the grounds really well and re-tighten them.
 
Are you saying the terminals were corroded? Would a dab of dielectric grease on the terminals prevent that?

Think I'll be greasing mine. :firing:
 
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