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Grahboi |
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WD Forte World Chat Champion
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MCN |
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MCN Super Spammer
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Posted: 11:27 - 15 Apr 2018 Post subject: |
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If the battery has been run flat then there may not be enough power in it to 'close' a main power relay. (Relay is a switch that controls high power using a low power control such as ignition key switch)
So you may not see any 'lights' but there may still be some power in the battery and it needs charged.
It probably won't even start with a push/bump either as the ignition needs a lot of power for a spark etc.
It is much easier to find problems using a multi-meter.
I do not understand why we are not given multi-meters when we are still at school.
More useful than a cellphone.
If you have jumper cables you can jump it from another battery.
Be careful if connected to an engine that is running though.
Any car battery should easily provide enough power to start any bike.
Make sure the bike is 12 volts (they normally are). ____________________ Disclaimer: The comments above may be predicted text and not necessarily the opinion of MCN. |
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Teflon-Mike |
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Teflon-Mike tl;dr
Joined: 01 Jun 2010 Karma :
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Posted: 13:02 - 15 Apr 2018 Post subject: |
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One of my firs lessons in motorbikes was watching my uncle try and 'stall' a twist-and-go.... works other-way-abouts, too, they dont bump-start so well, with a centrifugal clutch between back-wheel and engine...
Howebler... I would start at the top.....
1/ Do lights come on on the dash at all?
- If so, battery possibly not completely flat, but flat-enough not to give juice to starter
- If no.... battery probably utterly flat....
B-U-T it scootah... and 125, these are oft nicked, or tried to be nicked, look for obvious signes of attempted hot-wire before going further.
- If obvious signs of attempted theft/hot-wire... call cops... they will do effall, but it at least makes you feel like you done something...
- If no obvious sign of hot-wire..... battery is probably flatted... charge and re-try.
As advice above; most these days are 12v, so should charge off a conventional car battery charger, or 'jump' from a car. It IS however prudent to remove battery from scoot, before trying to jump it. Cars have beefy alternators and inbuilt regulators; attaching jump leads direct to a bike battery can mean that the bikes, pathetically little regulator/rectifier tried to regulate and rectify the hefty output of the car alternator... and fry itself in the attempt!
Its also a darn site easier, I find to get crocadile clips onto little bike battery terminals if the battery isn't in some fairy-finger to get at it hole on a motorcycle!
Fault vs Symptom?!?
A flat battery is one 'problem'... WHY it is flat, probably the more pertinent.... you might get scoot running charging battery up.... but what to stop it going flat again?
USUAL causes of flattery on bikes, is that they are of relatively small charge capacity, and charged by pretty unsophisticated and low capacity charging systems. Car battery's usually come with 3-5 year guarantee.. and may or may not last much more or less; bike batteries usually last less, and 3-years is pretty good going for one; if scoot is eligible for an MOT of close to, good chance its due a new battery anyway.. or this will be a recurring problem.
Next up: again, batteries are small. Customer expectation of last twenty years is that they should be as turn-key-freindly as a car, and have a a socket for a fag-lighter... sorry, thats so un 21st century PC... socket for a smurf-phone!
Little engines, though make little power, they don't make much to 'spare' to make electrick. Add an electric boot, that sucks mega amps, that system is going to struggle, before you add an array of idiot lamps, trafficators, and a port for your MP3 player!
Very common, these days, especially with Learner-Bikes, is that the learner is a little ham-fisted on the starter button, to get it going; sucks lots of amps from the battery in the doing, which little battery does'not like... battery will be rated at something like 8-10 Amp-Hours, that's the nominal charge or delivery rate, and the supply is 'fused' at maybe 10A... the starter however will by-pass that fuse and be on a direct heavy cable, so it can suck, perhaps 40 or 50 or more amps, which the battery can only tolerate briefly, before the electrolyte starts to break down of the plates start to warp.
This drain, means that the battery could be flatted in as little as fifteen minutes, from fully charged, and would probably refuse to turn the engine over a good while before that. If NOT^ fully charged, its going to be even less...
Now, that is the discharge rate.... mac charge rate is set by that main-fuse.... if its got a 10A fuse, and its a 10Ah battery, it would take an hour for the engine to charge it, through that fuse, without the fuse blowing.... SO, successively take more amps out the battery on start up, than you put back in, with hours of riding... and it gonna get flat....
On that profit/loss account, there tends to be more loss than profit, and with now almost obligatory 'hard-wired' lamps on all the while, sucking probably half the amps the little generator might make, before you start... sic... it's all too likely that a months worth of start-ups, and short journeys not putting back the amps used to start, that a battery WILL go flat on a little bike.
Add an alarm... Add a smurfone, add some horn beeping outside the chip-shop, and that add-or-subtract Amps equation is not doing any favours.... add even a slightly 'tired' battery, and it not going to be great.
EVEN if you have a brand-new battery, properly prepared by way of the acid packs, and gently trickle charged before use, as per instructions; you can STILL suffer periodic flatteries just from this taking more out than you put back in business.... bikes, particularly little ones, DO need periodic top-up charges...
And alarms, especially the cheap ones fitted as OE or after-market to bikes in general, and worse on little ones, DO tend to take a lot of amps, over a long period and make batteries go flat.
THIS could be your cause.... if so... a little rider ed is called for... and a little electric ecconomisation instilled.... as well as some basic routine maintenance, like possibly a weekly top-up charge of the battery......
Likely though, that the battery, has got rather tired, and if not utterly potatoes through repetitive 'deep-discharge' on start up.... as said, they don't last forever, they do need new ones fairly often, it could probably do with a new battery..... and that given a bit of case and attention in use.
JUST charging the battery, or JUST replacing the battery, is not, alone, a 'cure'.. you need to know WHY it went flat to start with, and do whtever is needed to give the battery best chance NOT to go flat again.
And on.... IF this don't sort it..... well, then there is probably something else wrong.... and top of that list is the suggestion already made, that jump-charging off a car, on the bike, can fry reg/rect units... if battery has been getting tired for a while, and an initial jump seemed to sort it, likely that has been repeated next time it struggled and time after that... and you COULD have more serious charging faults, that DO demand a multi-meter and some know-how to back-track to cause......
But start at top... immediate answer is probably just to get charge in the battery, via bench-charger or jump, heeding warnings, BUT.. likely that will only be a one-off fix of the symptom, not the desease; so check battery age, and consider the way its used vis repetative and or prolonged starts, and whether there's a ruddy alarm, sucking amps over long periods when ignition 'off'. ____________________ My Webby'Tef's-tQ, loads of stuff about my bikes, my Land-Rovers, and the stuff I do with them!
Current Bikes:'Honda VF1000F' ;'CB750F2N' ;'CB125TD ( 6 3 of em!)'; 'Montesa Cota 248'. Learner FAQ's:= 'U want to Ride a Motorbike! Where Do U start?' |
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Grahboi |
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Grahboi L Plate Warrior
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MCN |
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MCN Super Spammer
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Stalk |
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Stalk Brolly Dolly
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jaffa90 |
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jaffa90 World Chat Champion
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Grahboi |
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Grahboi L Plate Warrior
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Teflon-Mike |
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Teflon-Mike tl;dr
Joined: 01 Jun 2010 Karma :
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Posted: 16:35 - 16 Apr 2018 Post subject: |
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How many volts you get across the terminals of a battery, tells you NOT how much charge is in the battery... just how many volts you have across the terminals.
The Battery for my Honda Civic is something like 40Amp-Hours... that is how much charge it has when full. Battery for my Range rover is near double that, around 90Amp-Hours.. again, how much charge when full. Battery on the Seven-Fifty is I think, 20Amp-Hours... battery on the 125, I think 10Amp-Hours.
Four batteries, all very different physical sizes, all with as hugely diverse charge capacity, they are ALL 12v batteries, and give 12v across the terminals, with 'some' charge in them.
The volts across the terminals may fall as the battery discharges, but, it is not proportional to the charge in the battery.
Meanwhile.... as a battery gets old and tired, it will loose charge capacity... imagine a water-tank... it might hold 50 gallons when new... as it gets old, the tank rusts; the rust falls off and silts up the bottom; that silt catches lime-scale, the tank still holds 50-gallons... but, maybe a gallon of that is crap that ent going to go down the pipe; there's only 49 gallons of water in the tank you can drain off....
Now, imagine that the rust has got very bad, and at some point has holed the tank, still takes 50 gallons of water, but as you fill it up, when the level's above the hole, some leaks out.... older the tank, more holes in the tank, more it leaks....
BUT that tank is still in the loft... weight of water in the pipe, is still the same, hence the water pressure, which is analogous to battery voltage, doesn't change.... capacity of the tank, and effective capacity of the tank has, but measuring the pressure wont tell you if the tank is full or empty or got a hole in it... just that there's water-pressure!
The test for charge capacity is a drop-test, which measures actual discharge rate; you can do with a spike-meter, or the slow-way, coupling the battery to a car head-lamp and timing how long it keeps it lit... but THAT is telling you how much charge is in the battery, not measuring the voltage.
Again, back to top; ignore the terminal voltage; is there any signs of theft attempt or tampering? Proceed to how old the battery is, and making sure you have a fully charged full capacity battery to provide amps to starter... THEN tackle the symptom why flat to start with; could be simple old age; could be the charge/discharce cycle is gets, likely a combination of both....
DO NOT start jumping to complicated solutions for potentially simple problems, blaming CDI units.... that may simply not provide signal for sparks, because when the starter turned on it sucks so many amps from the battery, and causes such a terminal voltage 'drop' that the CDi dont get any electric from it!... like kitchen light flickering when the washing machine is turned 'on', and robs the amps from the ring-main. ____________________ My Webby'Tef's-tQ, loads of stuff about my bikes, my Land-Rovers, and the stuff I do with them!
Current Bikes:'Honda VF1000F' ;'CB750F2N' ;'CB125TD ( 6 3 of em!)'; 'Montesa Cota 248'. Learner FAQ's:= 'U want to Ride a Motorbike! Where Do U start?' |
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jaffa90 |
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jaffa90 World Chat Champion
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Grahboi |
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Grahboi L Plate Warrior
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Teflon-Mike |
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Teflon-Mike tl;dr
Joined: 01 Jun 2010 Karma :
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Posted: 09:55 - 17 Apr 2018 Post subject: |
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If its a 50cc ped, I would expect the battery to be around 4-5Ah. Standard car headlamp, as in the main-lamp, not the side-light aught to be a 55/50W bulb. Watts is Volts times Amps.. so 50 watts divided by 12 volts means about 4Amps. You have a battery some-where around 4 Amp-Hours, so 'quite a while' aught to be around an hour, not just a few minutes... is rather relative... so how long WILL this little battery keep a 50W bulb lit for? Hours or minutes?
If its kick-start only..... then issue of voltage drop and high current draw on start is redundant.. a-n-d when you say, at the start, Has no electrics at all".... that implies that there's no dash-lamps, no head-lamps, no indies, no horn, no nuffink....
Only place that electric can come from is the generator on the engine.
Battery is like a reservoir for electric; engine makes it, bungs it in battery; battery gives it to lamps and stuff when the engine not making enough.
So... battery has been taken off and charged; has electric in it. it can light a car head-lamp...
Now what's the 'problem'? If there's electric in the battery, dash-lamps should come on when the key is turned..... Headlamp and tail-lamp may NOT. These are likely wired off the generator, so that they wont flat battery when engine not running, and only get power when the engine is running.
If no dash-lamps, implies that if there IS electric in the battery... it's not getting to the idiot-lights.... which suggests as has been mentioned the main-fuse, and or connections.
If its a cylinder fuse, then do check carefuly, these do go loose over time, and the clip contacts are known to ride up the fuse barel so that they dont actually touch the contact caps on the ends. If blade type; check very carefuly that it isn't blown, it's often not visible, especially if they have broken from old-age and vibration rather than 'blown' as in melted from excess electric.
If fuse good.... and there is electric in battery, then dash-lamps, and possibly side-light should light up with the ignition.... if not, then electric still not getting through; check battery contacts, and look again for tamper damage around the ignition key-switch.
CDi... Capacitor-Discharge-Ignition... should make bog all odds to whether the headlamps come on... all the black box does is send electric to the spark-plug, via the coil. Should get its electric direct from the generator on the engine, and be on a pretty much independent circuit from the battery and charging system or other electrical equipment... also one of the usually most reliable devices on a motorcycle, unless you are certain its at fault, leave the dang thing alone!
If ANYTHING on that side of the electrickery is at fault, then its most likely the spark-plug, which is a service replaceable item, and does wear out. New plugs can make a world of difference to an engine, and if this is a two-smoke, even more so, as they do get oiled-up, especially if the engine isn't run for long or hard, to get it hot enough to burn off oil deposits from bunging oil into the petrol.
If the thing wont start; that's a different issue to no electrics; but start-point, if its not e-start, and is kick-only, IS to bung in a brand-new spark plug, some fresh new petrol, and check the two-stroke oil tank.... further fault-finding then checks to see if there is an actual spark at the plug, in free-air ie plug out the engine, and properly earthed to it.
With the ignition 'on' it's likely that the engine can run, without the battery, or any idiot lamps on the dash, the ignition a separate circuit to the charging and equipment circuit, and entirely self-powered from it's own winding in the generator; it's not like a car where the generator makes all the electric, puts all of it in the battery, and everything that needs electric, including the ignition takes it from there, through the ignition switch. Ignition switch on bikes, especially little ones, often works 'backwards' and 'makes' a circuit to earth the feed to the coil/spark-plug, 'short-circuiting' it rather than breaking the feed, that would have to go through the switch.
Ie, is the issue no-start, or no lights? And dont get crossed up confusing the two. If battery has electric in it; then dash and other lamps should light off it.. and that seperate issue to the engine not starting; for which, start point should be to look at the spark plug, not the battery. ____________________ My Webby'Tef's-tQ, loads of stuff about my bikes, my Land-Rovers, and the stuff I do with them!
Current Bikes:'Honda VF1000F' ;'CB750F2N' ;'CB125TD ( 6 3 of em!)'; 'Montesa Cota 248'. Learner FAQ's:= 'U want to Ride a Motorbike! Where Do U start?' |
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Pjay World Chat Champion
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