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A couple years ago there was a thread asking about storing the bike on the side stand and draining the battery.
The guy heard you shouldn't store a battery on a cement floor, or it will drain the charge from it and ruin it. So he surmised that if the battery was in the bike and the side stand was touching the cement floor the same thing would happen. So he wanted to know if you should insulate the contact point under your side stand.
I parked my bike on the kick stand with the tires touching the concrete ONCE! Never ran right again! I had to rotate my springs in my shocks, had to put new air in the tires, and replace the blinker fluid next spring. Even though I plugged my fuel tender in, and put stabilizer in my battery tank!
Finally I just broke down and bought a new bike and now I park it on my 24k gold lift in a vacuum sealed, temperature and humidity controlled vault with non UV lights. And before I put it up I change the oil and filter twice (once to flush the old stuff ya know,) wash it with purified bottled water only and a wash mitt made of the finest Chilean alpaca ear wool, then dry it off with a HEPA filtered blower, and wax it with a high grade carnauba wax, polish all the chrome, and top my tires off with some fresh twice filtered neon and pure oxygen gas mix (preserves the rubber, ya know.) then stuff rubber stoppers in the exhaust pipes and the intake. And that has always worked for me! Anybody who doesn't do this shouldn't even be worthy of owning a motorcycle if they can't do the upkeep and take the proper measures for winter storage.
A couple years ago there was a thread asking about storing the bike on the side stand and draining the battery.
The guy heard you shouldn't store a battery on a cement floor, or it will drain the charge from it and ruin it. So he surmised that if the battery was in the bike and the side stand was touching the cement floor the same thing would happen. So he wanted to know if you should insulate the contact point under your side stand.
That question been getting tossed around since before I started riding and I've heard long and well thought out arguments on both sides. When I lived in the cold states I did use a chunk of old mud flap under the kick stand during winter, did it help or not ? Couldn't tell you ...........
A couple years ago there was a thread asking about storing the bike on the side stand and draining the battery.
The guy heard you shouldn't store a battery on a cement floor, or it will drain the charge from it and ruin it. So he surmised that if the battery was in the bike and the side stand was touching the cement floor the same thing would happen. So he wanted to know if you should insulate the contact point under your side stand.
I've seen the temps here getting into the teens and single numbers and a few times below 0 and my bike is parked in my garage on cement with the stand down and it never drained my battery. This last year was the fist year that I used a battery tender. A friend of mine suggested it so I did it just for the heck of it.
A couple years ago there was a thread asking about storing the bike on the side stand and draining the battery.
The guy heard you shouldn't store a battery on a cement floor, or it will drain the charge from it and ruin it. So he surmised that if the battery was in the bike and the side stand was touching the cement floor the same thing would happen. So he wanted to know if you should insulate the contact point under your side stand.
In one of my other lives, I'm an electronics guy. Unless there's a wiring fault in the bike, that simply cannot happen. It's a myth.
I think the story about tire getting flat spots if left sitting for long periods of time comes from years ago when we had the 'nylon' tires. I'm not sure if it was nylon? But I do remember that they would flatten and you'd get a thump thump thump thump out of them for the first couple of miles. I'm pretty sure new tire compounds have taken care of that now.
I park my bike all year on rubber backed mats like you see in the entrances of stores. To be honest I'm not sure anymore why I do it. There was probably a good reason 100 years ago when I started doing it. lol
I also use a battery tender year around. My OEM battery lasted 7 years and is still being used in a riding lawn mower.
Stabil in the tank and an old sheet over the bike to keep the dust off.
(the sheet is used year around also)
Oh yeah, Bounce dryer sheets under the seat and in the exhaust pipe to keep the critters away.
All this stuff is good & true; however, I would not keep the battery in the bike over winter. It gets d@mn cold around here, and if something were to happen to cause the acid to leak, that would be a heck of a mess to clean up. I pop the battery out and bring it in the basement on the tender. My '09 had the OE battery when I traded it this summer.
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