2023-04-16 Welcome Spring!!!

I'd been a bit lazy, for when my Versys let me down in the fall of last year, no longer charging the battery and leaving me high and dry at Gas's grocery store in New Haven Prince Edward Island, Caroline helped me collect it, and we stuck it into her garage, where it has sat on a battery tender over the winter.

 

There is a real danger of ice today
It's 1C / 34F today!
Brrrrr!

I'd pulled into Gas' and refilled with the engine off, and the trouble began when the motor failed to start after paying and grabbing a couple of things. The owner of the store loaned me a battery boost pack big enough to jump start a truck, so it had no problem boosting the Versys back to life, but try as I might, I could get no clear indication that the battery was charging, and when I pulled the pack off, the bike would die immediately. Caroline arrived with her Klein Digital Multimeter and I proved that the battery wasn't taking a charge conclusively, so returned the pack and made arrangements to leave the bike and pick it up the next day. **Sigh. 

It was still September, so once we rolled the bike off the trailer and into Caroline's garage, I thought I'd have tons of time to repair it, but was truly dreading the cost, as a new stator and regulator could be over $1000 easily if you were buying OEM parts, but then along came Hurricane Fiona, the nasty beotch, and bikes were a thing of dreams for a bit there while we tried to put the island back together post storm. The the snow set in and there was always an excuse not to be outside freezing one's digits off. I finally got off my butt, read some online "How-To" material and decided I needed a definitive test of the bikes stator, but there is so much information on the topic that it becomes pretty overwhelming, and I may not have had the best meter in the world when I found that with the stator disconnected at the wiring harness plastic connector, a three wire, spade set up, that each leg of the stator was making more than 15VAC with respect to frame ground, and that increased as the revolutions went up.

ElectroSport Stator
ESG638 Stator Kawasaki ZX-6R/ZX-6RR
https://www.electrosport.com/collections/street-motorcycles-kawasaki-2009-versys-650/products/esg638-stator-kawasaki-zx-6r-zx-6rr

 Good, so electrically the stator was okay so the regulator rectifier must be to blame, right? WRONG!!! That stupid connector... one of the spades was "make or break" and that meant that the output to the battery was fine on two legs, but on the regulator rectifier side of the connector one of the legs was not making voltage at all, so it took a spade terminal and female terminal replacement to square it away in no time flat. 

Excessive arcing caused be a "too loose" connector. 

Darn it! I could have ridden well into Fall last year, but I'd mis diagnosed the problem and thought it was a much more expensive fix. 

The red size is about all you will need for a Versys
Unless you are dealing with battery cables :)

Well, procrastination works, and here I am riding it as a daily commuter while my Honda Civic gets it's yearly inspection and tune up by Nicholson's Garage in Darlington PEI where Eldred and Kevin are hard at work trying to keep that old machine on the road so I have a sled for those snowy days when you need four wheels on the ground. 

While my friends in Ontario have been camping already, I'm old enough and smart enough to wait for warmer weather for that, plus I still have to redo my fork seals and brake pads up front as well. On a bike that is now fourteen years old, you have to expect a few wee problems here and there, don't you? 

Shiny side up!!!

UPDATE: 2023-09-16

It was worse than I thought, and the bike ran okay for a bit, but I lost the use of my headlight, changed out the bulb to find out it was the relay not "latching" on due to insufficient battery/stator output. Much later that summer I had to ask my girlfriend to trailer my dead bike back to the apartment, where I put it on a charge, and ordered in a battery from Bolger Motorsports, the Kawi dealer. 
It wasn't the battery. I needed to bite the bullet and order in a new Stator, and Regulator/Rectifier (heavy duty Mosfet version this time) that got installed first weekend in September.)
So after a new "Trifecta" of electrical parts, the bike is running well and I can now pull over and kill the engine knowing that the AGM battery is going to have the juice to start the bike, and power my heated grips, high beams, and heated jacket, or charge a battery bank for moto camping later on that day. Win win but it exhausted my wallet, and cost me a planned trip to visit family in September, sadly. But having a reliable scoot back under me is a true joy, and I mean to get the most use I can out of it before the end of the riding season, which for me will be when it snows and sticks around with night time temps below zero, and daytime highs of less than 4 degrees Celsius. 

Cheers!