So I took the bike out for a ride yesterday, got off the highway, pulled in the clutch and the bike died. This happens on my bike, so I tried restarting and got the rapid-fire click of dead battery. I got a friend to trailer me back to his place and tried again, lights were strong but still bike wouldn't start. So I charged the battery overnight, the charger said it's all good, and when I put it in this morning now the lights won't even come on with a full battery...what's going on?
If the battery is fully charged, I don't see it being a charging issue
The lights worked right before I took out the battery, charged battery and now lights won't work.
I'm getting it trailed back to my place and was wondering what I should look at first?
Dead battery.
Have you check the voltage with a meter?
Have you checked your fuse? (no,not the spare. The real on hidden under the rubber cover.)
You didn't happen to put the battery in backwards? No, probably not. Hmmm.
You're going to have to start from basics:
- How to prove that the battery is fully charged? Even if you connect a meter and it reads 12+ volts, it's possible that the battery has no "oomph" left. Still, do that check just to make sure it's not totally dead.
- My next suggestion is to try a known-to-be-good battery. Take the battery out and use jumper cables to connect a car battery to the bike's battery cables. Make sure that the positive jumper cable clamp does NOT touch any metal part on the bike, other than the end of the positive battery cable!! If the bike starts right up, the bike battery (or possibly the connections to it) is definitely the culprit.
- If you still can't even get the lights to come on using the car battery, the next thing to check is the GS500 fuse.
- If the fuse passes a continuity test, check the ground connection (at the bottom end of the negative battery cable). It needs to be tight and free of dirt and corrosion.
Let's assume for a moment that the battery turns out to be bad. The obvious course of action would be to replace it with a new one, but I wouldn't stop there. With the new, fully-charged battery in place, I would also check the charging system. (It's possible that the "bad" battery got to be that way because of a faulty charging system ... you wouldn't want the same fate for your new battery, right?) You've probably seen at least one of the resources on how to check the charging system, but here's one of them just in case:
http://bbburma.net/Documents/JohnBates_ChargingCircuitTests3.pdf (http://bbburma.net/Documents/JohnBates_ChargingCircuitTests3.pdf)
FYI - I (and my bike) lived through a similar incident a few years ago. See the old thread Ole Yeller dies a spectacular (but temporary?) death... (http://gstwins.com/gsboard/index.php?topic=38456.msg431604#msg431604)
[EDIT: Added warning in
red.]