Zealot
The Village Idiot
Heya guys. Been having an issue now for a little while in which my idle is periodically rough for seemingly no reason, the bike is having a harder and harder time starting, and finally - it's died on me twice in the last two days, after slow bouts in traffic. Once it's running and I'm moving, there's no issues, but whenever I'm in gridlock/roasting in the heat, it gets way lopey and twice now has died - once when I came back after it started running rough, and just today while I was still on it. Had a guy give me a bump start and I was able to rocket my way through traffic along the shoulder and break at least 50 laws in order to get home without really, truly slowing down.
It seems to run and hold a charge just fine as long as I'm on it, which I think has something to do with the bike being ridden around 5000RPMs or higher (which is when they charge, AFAIK). Traffic and gridlock, meaning prolonged idling and low RPMs seems to kill it - and finding my battery terminals loose twice now is concerning (feels like it'd arc itself to death or whatnot), so I'm going to be grabbing some loctite and proper star washers to help hold the bolts in place with the new battery I just picked up. Would this by chance be related to the regulator/rectifier? I ask because it runs fine when I'm on it and after having tightened the battery connections, but dies when I'm doing little to nothing. Then again, perhaps there isn't enough power being generated by the R/R which is a common thing to 'go' on this bike, and my spark plugs were looking sort of fouled as if they ran rich - and I'd imagine that would increase the amount of power required to make a spark, and run the battery down even faster. I've got a new battery, and will be getting new spark plugs in a few days. Do you think it'd be worth grabbing an R/R to eliminate any/all potential problems?
It seems to run and hold a charge just fine as long as I'm on it, which I think has something to do with the bike being ridden around 5000RPMs or higher (which is when they charge, AFAIK). Traffic and gridlock, meaning prolonged idling and low RPMs seems to kill it - and finding my battery terminals loose twice now is concerning (feels like it'd arc itself to death or whatnot), so I'm going to be grabbing some loctite and proper star washers to help hold the bolts in place with the new battery I just picked up. Would this by chance be related to the regulator/rectifier? I ask because it runs fine when I'm on it and after having tightened the battery connections, but dies when I'm doing little to nothing. Then again, perhaps there isn't enough power being generated by the R/R which is a common thing to 'go' on this bike, and my spark plugs were looking sort of fouled as if they ran rich - and I'd imagine that would increase the amount of power required to make a spark, and run the battery down even faster. I've got a new battery, and will be getting new spark plugs in a few days. Do you think it'd be worth grabbing an R/R to eliminate any/all potential problems?