Electrical Gremlins?

Can anyone offer any suggestions?

Today on my commute home, my 05 VFR experienced a total electrical shutdown. Gearing down and popping the clutch did nothing to restart the bike.

After safely pulling over across three lanes of traffic and finding some shade (98 degrees in Dallas today), with the ignition on, I discovered no headlights and no high beam light on the dash panel, but every other light on the bike operable.

Hitting the starter time after time only caused the bike to run for a couple of seconds and then it would shut down. On one try, the bike idled for about a minute, then when I revved it to about 6,000 RPM, the bike shut down again.

I let it cool for about 20 minutes, started the bike again and it looked like it would run. Less than a mile down the road, it did it again, same symptoms, but I kept thumbing the starter every time the bike shut off and I was able to "limp" it home. At one stop light though, I turned the left turn indicator on (while the bike was at idle) and the bike shut down (just as if I'd hit the kill switch or turned off the ignition switch). The same thing happened with the right turn indicator engaged (logically).

Here's the weird part. About 5 miles from home, the headlights came back on, highbeam light on the dash panel came back on and the bike ran like normal. In this condition, the left and right turn indicators worked normal as well. Everything was as if nothing was wrong at all!

Has anyone ever had a similar situation with their bike? The one thing I'm not confident tearing into on this bike is the electronics (I even had my PC III USB professionally installed) so, unless I hear from you guys, I'm off to my local dealer tomorrow to see what's up.

Thanks!!!

 

Regulator.

 

Thanks.

That sounds like a reasonable place to start.

 

Loose ground
Bad kill switch connection
Loose fuse
Loose ignition - wiggle key

 

just because it is not a widespread problem anymore, doesn't mean that some will not still occassionally go bad

but Mason had some other ideas too

 

Mason,

But what about having no headlights even when the bike was running? And then... they magically reappeared!

That's what has me really puzzled...

 

When you press the start button, the headlight turn off (it's supposed to). I had that issue when my start switch stuck "ON" - the starter was turning too - but was hard to hear over the engine.

 

Ahh... that could be the issue, because I would have to thumb the starter button to get the ignition to refire... but I never heard the starter gears hit the flywheel. So... was the problem in your starter switch or in the solenoid of the starter?

Sitting at a red light, the situation seemed to resolve itself in that the headlights came back on.

Here's another wrinkled though... if I hit the left or right turn indicator switch with the bike running, it would cut the ignition and the bike would stop running. But it didn't do it when the headlights were on.

Any ideas about that?

 

Check the plug on the regulator. Pull apart, clean, look for melting. Sounds like a bad connection since it corrected itself.

 

Thanks for the tip...

The intermittent characteristic of the problem makes me think bad connection, corrosion or similar. If it was total R/R failure, it would not have come back the way it did.

Dealer said he can't get to it until Tuesday, so I may go back and grab it tomorrow before they invest any time in it. With all the help from the forum, I feel like I can at least do some of the suggested checks and maybe save a few bucks!

Thanks again for all the help!