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Well, I must have gotten lucky. I replaced the cables with aircraft grade cables, and replaced the battery with an Interstate brand and.......it turned right over! Wooohooo! It's about time that damn $10 bell worked!!!
The state of the discharged battery will determine the risk of any damage occurring when the donor vehicles engine is running. Also, the larger the donor vehicles charging system, the higher the risk.
If the discharged battery is just slightly low enough to where it won't crank the engine over, the back EMF voltage of the battery will limit that massive current surge from the donors charging system. Still no guarantee though, it can still happen.
If the battery is deeply discharged to where you don't even get lights, youre almost guaranteeing that there will be a surge of sort. These surges are also associated with high voltage spikes. And even though they are milliseconds, they can still cause damage to a charging system. It's not guaranteed that it will do damage, but much more likely.
With a really good set of cables, it's not necessary to have the donor vehicle running, especially when the donor vehicle is a car. Not having the motor running is the safest way by far. Even if the donor vehicle is another motorcycle, as long as it's a battery of equal size or larger and it's fully charged, the engine doesn't have to be running. Just dont keep cranking on it when there are other problems keeping it from starting, otherwise you are going to end up with 2 dead batteries..... Doh!
I was stupid and left the ignition on. Not even a click when I came out. Jumped it from a buddy's bike with cables and four sets of needle nose pliers. It worked, but it was a PIA.
Has anybody ever thought about connecting the battery charger connections between two bikes using the HD charger extension cable? It might not be an immediate start, but maybe locking the running bike at 2k for a few minutes might be enough to crank the dead bike. A fist sized coil of extension cord beats a basketball wad of jumper cables any day in a saddlebag.
made up a set like that to plug into my bat tender plug so I don't have to pull the seat off , just let it set a min , other end has clamps with the plug
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