• 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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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!

ChromeBattery AGM 14-BS??

AGM or Absorbed Glass Mat are just regular deep cycle lead acid batteries. ChromeBattery is listed as an American company but imports it's batteries from offshore (most likely China). I replaced my quad battery a couple of times with Chinese jobs and got about a year each out of them.Very poor quality batteries! Will never buy another one.
Went back to the Yuasa about three years ago.
 
willie said:
AGM or Absorbed Glass Mat are just regular deep cycle lead acid batteries. ChromeBattery is listed as an American company but imports it's batteries from offshore (most likely China). I replaced my quad battery a couple of times with Chinese jobs and got about a year each out of them.Very poor quality batteries! Will never buy another one.
Went back to the Yuasa about three years ago.
Click to expand...

Thx willie.
 
I put a Yuasa YTZ in my 610 when the Varta left me stranded....was very happy to see a good Yuasa battery as oem on the 630.
 
Shorai power!!! You can't believe how much lighter it is than the Yuasa - it feels like it is an empty plastic box. But it works great and cranks the bike over faster than the stock unit did. Between that and a Leo Vince Ti exhaust you can knock almost 30 pounds off the top of the bike...
 
For the most part motorcycle batteries are AGM so they can be mounted in any direction, like sideways.

Shorai's are the schiznit, albiet at $150 a pop. They are the new lithium polymer technology. That said, I've been buying batteries from Costco, Sams, and Walmart for years with great success. For some reason Johnson Controls gets the contract to supply, or they're in bed somehow, but anyway they have always worked just fine for me. I've never had an issue with a battery other than user error (burned up by using 6A charger) or just wearing them out after 4-6 years.

It is critical that a lead-acid battery remain fully charged, or at least 80% or better at all times. Discharged below 50% and left that way is bad for them, and fully discharged will ruin them. Even one complete discharge is enough to reduce their life substantially. Throw a trickle charger on them once a month in storage to keep them charged up, but don't overcharge them, that's just as bad.

I'm kind of an old battery guru....ran 12V systems on boats for decades, then motorcycles and RV's. I've got 11 batteries to maintain at home. The husky is just one of them. :D
 
CJ, can a battery tender overcharge a battery? I always thought you should keep the battery tender on all of the time, when not in use. Thx for the post.
 
"Battery Tender" has a pretty good explanation themselves here: http://batterytender.com/resources/float-charging.htm

I'm not sure of the 'jr' version has the float-charge setting or not. Seems their 'plus' does. The problem with leaving a trickle charger on a battery constantly is that it tends to overcharges them. On the flipside, if you let it self-discharge and forget and it gets too low then that is just as bad for them. Ideally you put a charger on them once a month, bring them to full charge, and then disconnect for another month.

Other influencing factors is temperature. If you look at self-discharge rates for lead acid batteries, at 45 degrees it's almost nil. On the other hand at 90 degrees it's like 30 days. This one of the reasons battery life is so short in Arizona. :D

Here's another good site for reading material on 12v systems, this one is for RV's but the material comes from a variety of sources, all good stuff on battery technology, care and maint.: http://rvroadtrip.us/library/12v_system.php
I've actually printed out the resting terminal voltage chart for state of charge and pasted it up in my garage.

If you're going to leave a charge source connected to an idle battery for long periods of time then you need to make sure it's an 'electronic' or 'smart' type charger so that when the battery reaches full charge it cuts the voltage back to a maintenance level. The problem here is that a float level is maybe a half a volt over full charge state, which is 12.9 volts, so probably just under 13.5 volts. Regular charge voltage is somewhere between just over 14v to about 15v. If the charger isn't smart enough to scale back the voltage and amperage then it fries your battery. For a liquid cell battery it will boil all the water out - another problem with long term charging. You have to maintain the electrolyte level by adding distilled water.

For me the easiest way is to put a trickle charger on them for a few hours every couple of weeks and measure terminal voltage at resting state to determine state of charge both before and after recharging. If I put a meter on a motorcycle battery and it's over say, 12.6 volts I leave it. If it's less I put a charger on it for a few hours.

Another reason I stick with plain-jane ol' batteries is the simplicity of maintenance and charging, voltage measure, etc., unlike these new-fangled ones as you can throw it all out the window with them - they all have their own peculiarities, charging rates, discharge rates, etc. The first time I heard you needed to 'warm up' a lypo to make it work I thought whoa, that's not for me. :D
 
Looks like a nice product. I wonder who makes them. I do like 'made in usa', that's for sure.

Would be nice to saw one in half along with a cheapo one from walmart and just see plate, assembly method, and case differences, just to see if its worth spending the extra $$.
 
Walmart wanted $84. inc core charge and tax. They also didn't have one in stock. I ordered the Big Crank and it was shipped the same day and schedueled to arrive in 1 day with free shipping. I'll post it's performance.
 
Got the battery in one day. That's pretty alright by me. It says made in the USA, but doesn't say by who. It came with front mount adapters. It fit perfectly and started the 1st crank. I'm a happy camper so far!!

By the way, the dead spot in 1st and 2nd gear is gone and my dash is working correctly now.
 
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