I've been lurking some but it's been awhile since I posted anything, keeping busy with riding and life and all that stuff...

...then Murphy happens...

I go for a ride on Sunday, peace, love, and happiness for a hundred miles or so out on the road somewhere...fill up, roll into the garage and another day ride is done.

Wednesday morning I am heading out for a morning workshop and my ride won't crank. Not only will it not crank, it ain't got lights, indicators, nada, nothing. I switch back and forth and notice that accessory is acting weird and ignition is dead. I'm thinking that the switch is NFG so I put my multimeter on the aux power plug that is connected directly to the battery and it reads battery voltage like it is supposed to. I switch to accessory and it starts jumping really low, and when I switched to ignition, it goes to zero. Now, this is reading across the battery and has nothing to do with the switch. So, I am thinking the battery has discharged somehow so I pull it loose and verify that the voltage goes to zero when the switch is turned to ignition.

I pull the battery and put it on my bench charger and it charges up normally but I keep thinking this is all weird since nothing was turned on to drain it and the battery is only about six months old. I've been doing this kind of chasing errant electrons stuff for decades so I go through the routine, looking at and making sure connections are clean and tight and evidence of overheating, something, anything...and find nothing, zip, nada. But every time I switch to ignition, the voltage across the battery terminals goes to zero. Ohms Law says that something somewhere should be getting hot or smoking if the battery is pushing that much current to drop the volts to zero but nope, nothing that I can feel, smell, or see.

I am thinking that maybe there is some weird internal mechanical failure in the battery causing these readings so I pull the battery again and haul it to the local automotive store where they twice verified that the battery would deliver full cranking amps at 10.99 volts. Ain't nothing wrong with that battery.

Now this is where it is really weird. If that battery can deliver full CCA to drive the volts to zero across the terminals, then how can those amps not be cooking something somewhere??

I start pulling connectors, fuses, repairing and replacing and gooping up looking for something, anything, but I still cannot find anything out of order. I start reading for circuit shorts to ground in the system with my Fluke and cannot find anything out of the ordinary and so I power it up again and it is all working just like it is supposed to. ****...maybe.

I start putting it back together one circuit branch at a time slowly, looking at everything again and still cannot find any issues or explanations. The volts hold with the ignition switch in both positions, all the lights work, and it cranks right up with the battery voltage never dropping below 10.9 volts, charging at 14.1 volts at 1000 rpm. Put it all back together and rode around the block, no problems....

I am thinking my battery is somehow AFU but as long as it does what it is supposed to do on the bench, I will never get a warranty adjust from HD.

I have an early morning ride tomorrow. I am going to clean it all up, put the float charger on it tonight, and pray that Murphy is satisfied that I chased my tail on this for over 10 hours in 90+ degree heat. But, like I said, I know how this works and I know that if you didn't find and fix the problem, then it ain't fixed...

If you have ever experienced a problem like this, tell us about it...

 

I can't tell you what's wrong but I CAN say this one time I might have hooked up a flakey Optima Red Top battery to a 200A charger and went to eat lunch, maybe forgetting to unplug it. It might have vented and they might have replaced it free...

 

For a while I had all my toys on battery maintainers. I began to get bad batteries, similar to what you describe...voltage, but no amperage. Many of the batteries were less than a year old. I no longer keep my toys on maintainers. I drive them all monthly, or put them on a charger monthly if I don't have time to drive them all. But the charger comes off the next day.

I haven't lost a battery since I scrapped the maintainers 3 years ago. I don't know what they do that kills the cells, but something screws them up.

 

The problem happened again a few weeks ago and I verified that the battery was NFG. I took the battery back to the dealer I got it from and they made a warranty exchange.

What you are saying makes a lot of sense. I did not put a tender on my other battery until it was over three years old, and only then to squeeze the last few cranks out. I had been using it on the new battery because I had not been able to ride regularly.

 

That happened top my bike and the positive power cable had come lose was all that had happened.

 

This is the thing with trickle chargers, and something I and a lot of people overlook. Trickle chargers are pretty good, but the connections do scum up over time, I killed a battery on a friends Suzuki bandit and on my Honda X-11 without realizing it, when it killed my friends battery that's when I got suspicious of the charger itself, the cure was simple, I noticed that each time it went into disalfication mode, when really it didn't need to, so I got a tooth brush and some electrical cleaner and cleaned both the charger connection to the bike and the bikes connection to the charger ( male and female connector ) and haven't had any problems with since.

 

If the voltage regulator is getting hot it may cut out after the temperature reaches a certain point and stop charging the battery. Just a thought, try testing it after your ride to see if the battery is still getting charged when everything is up to temp.