Battery (New) won't stay charged... any ideas

my battery will not stay charged.... i definetly know it's not the battery... i bought a new battery and it drained on my 1st ride w/ it.... i am ambarrased to say i do not know much about repairing motorcycles.... is a bike like a car and have a Alternator???????? any input????
Thanks in advance..
Brian

 

Brian,

A little more info mate. What year is your bike?

Most likely the regulator. Do you own a voltmeter?

 

Almost all modern motorcycles have alternators.
The alternator,via the rectifier changes the current to dc to charge your battery. (simple explanation)
you need a volt- OHM meter. Set the meter to the 12 volt scale.
Attach the black lead to ground of the battery and the red wire from the meter to the positive on the battery.
When the battery is at rest and the engine is not running the meter should read about 13.8 volts.
Yes I know it is called a 12v battery but each of the six cells is about 2.3-2.7 volts.
Now start the engine and let it idle. The meter should read about 15 volts and increase as the engine speeds up .
IT may read as high as 16-17 volts if the battery is charging a lot. The excess energy is given off
as heat through the cooling fins of the rectifier aluminum finned heat sink.

If the battery leads are dirty with a black greasy substance it can keep the battery from getting a good connection.
Many times people do not realize that the black greasy coating is the problem. Use baking soda to clean it and sandpaper the connections.
Your headlights and horn may work but it will not start. The reason is that the connections cannot carry enough load for the starter.
Eventually the battery runs down and people think it is a bad battery, alternator , regulator, not enough fuel in the carb etc.,etc,you get the picture.
And when you cannot get it started some passerby always says,"Sounds like it is not getting enough fuel". Then someone starts taking the fuel system apart.
Then it ends up in back of the house in the weeds rusting away.

 

All too true.

 

Did you charge the battery, did it come 'fully charged' or did the store that sold it to you do the charging? Clean the connectors per Donalds advice and recharge the battery for a full 24hrs on a trickle charger. Reconnect the battery and do the 2 minute 'lights and ignition on' test and see if there is a significant voltage drop across the battery terminals. If there is a voltage drop to less than 10 volts or so then you may just have a bad battery that needs to be returned for exchange. If there's no significant voltage drop that would be when you need to start looking at the rest of the charging system, and electrical connections, for a source of the problem.

 

I would take the battery back, it could be a bad one.

 

Picked up my girlfriend's pearl white '93 a few months ago. Beautiful bike but noticed the aftermarket "bright" bulbs and thought too much wattage. Started having charging issues so I disconnected the headlights until we could get some OEM bulbs. Looked at regulator and found signs of heat damage (brittle & cracked casing) along with some almost fried wiring. I don't know for sure if the bulbs did all the damage but I'm sure it did some. Now just waiting for that $220 regulator and re-doing the connector to it. Lesson: ditch those "cute" lights. Aftermarket were 55W. OEM are 45W. PS; I have small hands but the bulb clips were not easy.

 

There are shims to install other than those lights that Honda screwed a bunch of owners with.

You might want to take a look in the many archived posts about R/R's, batteries and wiring harnesses. $220.00 for an OEM R/R ?? This has to be a quote from your local stealer who IMO should have enough savvy to know these R/R's crap out all too frequently and have at least a couple in stock.

Find a better deal and buy two. Keep one under your seat. You will need it. ..and forget about Honda ever owning up to anything about the part.

The positive side is that when you question your "friendly" parts guy at your dealership, it's a good way to determine if he is BSing you on other matters too.

 

I had to do a doubletake when I saw the price because I swear I saw a much cheaper price before, but, this was at Bike Bandit. Is this not a "friendly" place to shop? If not, have any online suggestions? My "friendly" dealer went out of business a year ago. I'm not so hot on the survivng dealers in the area (installed tires wrong and really didn't care!). As much as I like to support my local economy, I can't reward incompetence. Anyway, thanks for the words...

 

Yep, I know who that "friendly" dealer was.. They got to me once too. $200.00 and change and not a single one in stock and they only ordered from the Torrance warehouse. I found one online from a little shop in Arkansas for $113.00.
Tires? Seattle Cycle Center.. General work on your bike? George Dean. George sold the biz to his main guy and his main guy hired a guy from the "friendly" dealer. That dealer went through folks except family like shit through a goose.

Bought a couple of things from Bike Bandit including a new helmet, some starter clutch parts ect. They were faster getting my stuff to me than the "friendly" folks at Screw U Honda..

 

this problem is all too common with not only VFR owners, but really a lot of Honda owners across the board. one thing i found when i had this problem is that honda has never exactly been the pinnacle of charging system design. with the vfr's, there are really several points of failure that you want to look at.

ill start out by defining a few charging system parts for you. first there's the Stator. you were asking about an alternator earlier...bikes dont have an "alternator" by definition, but we do have something similar enough that does the same job, that being the stator. this is located under your left side engine cover. these dont go bad a lot, but they do go bad.

Next, is the motorcycle version of a Voltage Regulator. This is called the regulator/rectifier, more commonly referred to as an r/r. the r/r receives the newly generated charge current from the stator, regulates it to where it wont burn up your 12 volt charging system, and then sends that current back to the battery so the battery can power your electrical stuff and maintain its charge.

believe it or not, that is the bulk of the charging system. not really complicated when you get down to studying it, but INSANELY frustrating when you have to troubleshoot it. so on to the diagnosis and repair.

the first thing to check, and by far the easiest, is that the 3 wire connector that connects the stator to the Regulator/Rectifier has a BAD tendency to heat up, burn, char, and then not be able to carry sufficient current through the connector, hence the R/R doesnt get enough current, hence the battery doesnt get enough current, and subsequently dies. i had a honda dealership literally hand me a new connector. all i had to do was cut my old one off, install the new connector on the both the stator and r/r wiring, and of course PLEASE use the di-electric terminal grease that was suggested earlier in this thread....ppl never give that stuff the credit it deserves for dissipating heat and preventing premature wear on connectors.

the next thing to check, and naturally a really easy one, is to give your charging system a once over and just make sure everything is tight. no loose nuts, no loose bolts, no loose connectors....this really keeps with the KISS principle of bike repair, and you might be surprised how often such attention to detail can save you a lot of heartache down the road.

now onto the fun stuff. parts failure. the older VFR's have an achilles heel in the R/R being internally grounded. this causes the R/R to heat up a lot, and the piss poor mounting position of most any VFR R/R causes it to have poor air flow around the device, hence when it heats up it just sits there in its own ambient heat and cooks itself. a while back when i was facing these problems, i threw all my research into one big howto thread, and this is one of the problems i addressed. I recommend following this whole procedure not only to you, but to anybody reading this thread, as its helped my old 87 vfr a LOT since i did it.

http://vfrworld.com/forums/mechanics-garage/17895-charging-system-upgrade-explained.html

once you have the parts and all, itll take about as long to do the work as it takes to read that whole thread.

definitely get a decent voltmeter and find the right points to do testing around your bike...I never was able to find what numbers to expect from what test points, but im sure somebody around this forum knows the right answers.

good luck dude, and hopefully youre back on the road soon!

 

Actually, my bad experience was "in Renton". They couldn't care less about the little arrow showing the direction of mounting a tire. The R/R? Even $50 more than Bike Bandit. They all sat around bullshitiing while I waited for someone to "help" me. I don't know what kinda place it is to work for, but in this economy, they better get on thier game.

 

Whoops.. thought you were talking about the "favorite" dealer in the Broadway area. Looks like another one is gone too. I'm all for the local economy too, but not at the cost of having to bend over and get the shaft without at least a little grease on it..

 

Did not care about which way the arrow was facing?

How about reporting them to consumer affairs?

I would tell them if the arrow is not facing the right direction that YOU WILL NOT PAY!!!

Get tough bro!!!!