*digital Multimeter* is what you want btw, its much easier to read than the old needle ones. but another thing just came to my mind...

Check your ground point under the tank and make sure the bolt has the ground wires bolted down tightly and is getting good contact(not corroded). Thats a simple check and if your ground is not getting good contact it will do what its doing.

 

anything?

 

funny you ask because I was just login on to update you hcstreet;
i stayed up until 5 day before yesterday going through all the wires and making sure all of them looked okay and they did.
i put battery back on charger just to double check and it showed full charge.
i lost all my hair and was about to give up so i called a local m/c shop and they said they are booked until June 3rd (must be nice)
so i went out to buy a multimeter (which i did) but figured, what the heck, i might as well take the battery out and take it in to do a load test while i'm there.
what do you know? sure enough, the guy calls me 30 min's later and says yo man, your battery is completely dead.
no one had the correct battery size in stock (and i was too antsy to wait and order one) so i went to walmart and bought one slightly larger to see if it'll fit (and it does .. just barely)
so i filled it up with electrolyte put it on the trickle charger (same charger that said the dead one had full charge mind you) and charged it up and put it in and bike fired right up.

i was going to wait to see if i just put a bandaid on the situation or if i actually solved the root of the problem. i checked the wires on r/r and nothing looks burnt but i'm just waiting and curious to see if the r/r and/or stator fries this new battery or not. if it does i'll be asking for your help again .. but as of now it looks okay so i really appreciate your help and feel embarrassed it was the battery after all []

what i'm still perplexed about however is that in all my years of dealing with batteries on bikes and cars i've never seen one just die immediately with absolutely no warning of any kind. I mean when i put the key in the ignition and turned it on, for the brief couple of seconds it had FULL power with bright head light on, all lights on dash on, and then died immediately when i hit the start button. i wonder if the battery tender i use does such a good job that it keeps a battery completely full RIGHT UP to the point of death vs. one that's not on a tender that gives you a little warning like lights dimming and such?? I've had this battery on a tender from new after every ride so maybe that's it? [&:]

 

btw, even if it does end up just being the battery i still appreciate the stuff you asked me to do because I like learning about the bike and I learned some new stuff.

 

how old was the battery? I am in school to be an chemical engineer and we have been working with battries of this type for a few months now and althought it is not common it can easily die out of no where like that, specially when they get old or if they are over charged.

Be careful with that battery tender, it may be overcharging it, check with your multimeter and see what voltage the battery puts out when it is fully charged, it should never be above 13.5v.

When a battery is charged lead goes from being an ion in solution to a solid lead or a lead salt on the electrodes, when its over charged it will produce too much lead on those electrodes(12 in every battery, 6 voltaic cells) and cause them to begin to start another reaction producing a weaker lead salt instead of the intended metal for the electrode. The battery will still work with after that happens but it becomes very sensitive and brittle on the inside, and the vibrations from the bike can cause them to break off which then means the battery is toast. the 6 voltaic cells are in a series(six bottles of fluid that you put in the new battery, one for each cell) and if one loses its electrode then the whole circuit is dead. Also, just regular use will cause the electrodes to wear normally in which case it will slowly quit taking holding charge because of the internal reactions taking place and can die from the reactants being all used up or from becoming increasingly weak and falling apart like before. Welcome to the last couple months of my life haha

Good luck hope the battery fixes everything!

 

Glad to help! its always fun to learn new things about bikes.

 

I don't know about that, but I do know some chargers can be left on a battery forever and some need to be removed when the charge is complete.

Not sure if it is a, "cheap" factor or what but I paid $45 for my trickle charger and I still have to remove the terminals after charging so I don't want to know what the others cost [&:]

Hey don't feel bad - you can only work with what you've got and if you've got a broken tool and didn't know it, these things can happen to anyone.

Good thing it was your tender and not a torque wrench...

 

another note, there are a few reasons why the charger might have said the battery was fully charged, but im not going to take a stab at that one, i just know that can happen from my experiences so far with chemistry labs.

 

It was the original OEM battery so it was definitely due to croak. As a matter of fact, the tender did it's job and did double the batts life from what I gather. Never had any issues with tenders before on this bike or previous ones but I'll keep my eye on it .. it also gives me a chance to use the new multimeter so i'll do the voltage check on the new battery as well.

Are you saying a bad r/r can cause this while the bike is running or this can only happen while the bike is off (or both)? I was under the assumption that is a battery tenders purpose; to keep it from being over or under charged.

 

I have both .. i used the regular $80 charger to check if had full charge and I use a battery tender (the $30 cheap kind) to keep it floating at the correct charge.
The tender is the kind you can leave on forever and the other one you're supposed to disconnect after full charge (although it also says it has an auto shut off switch built in so it doesn't overcharge)
Just very odd/weird that the charger said it had full charge (as indicated by the meter gauge and the little green light) when it was in fact completely dead .. but who knows, mysteries that I can't solve all around us. It would actually make more sense if the charger was faulty and wasn't able to charge my new battery but it did that just fine. [&:]