On my way to escort Santa to deliver some presents this morning and the bike starts missing. I thought plugs might be fouled so I turned around and limped it to an Auto Zone, bought new plugs and swapped them out. Hit the ignition switch and nothing, no voltage at all so either the Taiwanese battery that the previous owner installed is toast or its my charging system. Auto Zone's tester wouldn't work on it, although it worked fine on a new battery off the shelf. After I towed the bike home, I put the battery on my charger and my charger wouldn't detect that the leads were hooked up and I was showing over 13 volts with my ohmmeter on a battery that I know isn't fully charged. I take the battery to Advance auto to have them test it so that I don't spend $100.00 throwing a new battery at this thing and it not fix the problem. The tester at Advance shows it needs a charge but wasn't showing any other unusual signs. I'm going to let them charge it overnight and hopefully tomorrow I can determine whether I need another battery or a new stator.

 

I would suspect regulator before I would suspect the stator.


Let us know what you find.

 

I'm thinking toasted Taiwanese battery...

 

Could be a shorted battery . They will show voltage on a meter etc. but fall to 0 Volts under load. Try a load test on the battery to see if this is the case.

 

I'm leaning more toward a bad battery right now, but I won't know until tomorrow. I want it fully charged when we do the load test so I know for sure what I've got.

 

Buy an HD or equivilent AGM battery. No reason to use the old lead/acid stuff.

 

You're preaching to the choir brother!! Taiwanese garbage will not be going back in

 

Then why are you charging it????????
Remember even on a new battery you should hook it up to a tender to get it to full charge before installing it on your bike.

 

because I want to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that my charging system isn't ****

 

When I bought my 1996 EVO, it would not charge the battery, I followed the procedure in the service manual to test the stator, and it tested good, so I changed out the regulator and it has been good ever since. All you need to test the stator with is a AC voltage meter, and the bike has to start to test it.