Gday all, im looking for some help diagnosing/fixing my bike. It just died on the ride to work. Initially the display was flickering and then stopped, followed by the bike starting to cough and splutter at constant throttle. I pulled into a side street and the motor died as soon as i let the throttle off completely. The display strated working again after turning the ignition off and on, but the motor wouldnt turn over in response to pressing the started button, it only triggered the ignition relay. I assume this is an electrical issue but i have no idea where to look. Any help would be much appreciated! cheers
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Hi everyone,
As you all know, Coffee (Dean) passed away a couple of years ago. I am Dean's ex-wife's husband and happen to have spent my career in tech. Over the years, I occasionally helped Dean with various tech issues.
When he passed, I worked with his kids to gather the necessary credentials to keep this site running. Since then (and for however long they worked with Coffee), Woodschick and Dirtdame have been maintaining the site and covering the costs. Without their hard work and financial support, CafeHusky would have been lost.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working to migrate the site to a free cloud compute instance so that Woodschick and Dirtdame no longer have to fund it. At the same time, I’ve updated the site to a current version of XenForo (the discussion software it runs on). The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.
Unfortunately, the new software version doesn’t support importing the old site’s styles, so for now, you’ll see the XenForo default style. This may change over time.
Coffee didn’t document the work he did on the site, so I’ve been digging through the old setup to understand how everything was running. There may still be things I’ve missed. One known issue is that email functionality is not yet working on the new site, but I hope to resolve this over time.
Thanks for your patience and support!
449 died mid ride
- Thread starter gopie
- Start date
Does sound electrical. Did you check the simple stuff like fuses and connectors? has the bike been wet recently?
Thanks for the input guys, much appreciated. After finally having a look I realised that id forgotten to plug in the voltage regulator after having the bike apart on the weekend (don't judge me haha). The bike is starting now and the display seems fine but something still doesn't seem right. During starting it takes more cranks to turn over than it used to, kind of like the battery is low on charge (its not though). Does anyone know if riding the bike without the regulator can damage anything?
The voltage regulator's job is to keep all systems in the correct voltage range as well as to ensure the battery gets a proper charge. With it out of line, there's no telling what the voltage going to the battery might have been. I had a voltage regulator go south in my '70 Ford van climbing into the Sierras. A lead acid battery that is being overcharged has quite a unique smell!
Check the resting voltage on the battery, start it and see how low it drops when cranking. Then monitor while it's idling. One damaged cell can ruin a battery fast.
Check the resting voltage on the battery, start it and see how low it drops when cranking. Then monitor while it's idling. One damaged cell can ruin a battery fast.
The voltage regulator's job is to keep all systems in the correct voltage range as well as to ensure the battery gets a proper charge. With it out of line, there's no telling what the voltage going to the battery might have been. I had a voltage regulator go south in my '70 Ford van climbing into the Sierras. A lead acid battery that is being overcharged has quite a unique smell!
Check the resting voltage on the battery, start it and see how low it drops when cranking. Then monitor while it's idling. One damaged cell can ruin a battery fast.
I changed the battery and the bike seems fine so looks like you picked it! Cheers for the help, much appreciated!