Went for a ride today, and as I leaned through a roundabout I lost power similar to the way when you run out of fuel. Gave the throttle a squeeze and it sputtered for a sec and then took off. The bike continued to act this way until I got home. It also did the same thing as I went over the crest of a very steep bridge.

Backfired a little once, and there's a strong petrol smell.

Do you think it's the carb or the spark? Anything I should check and report back? It's been sitting around for a couple of weeks doing nothing, it's also been a very cold and wet couple of weeks.

There was a thread not long ago by a guy who was complaining about weird highway behaviour, he was getting pulses of power at speed. My bike was doing that a while ago, but it was windy that day so I just attributed it to being buffeted by the wind.

I'll give it a charge and see if that changes anything, too.

Gave it a charge and it seems to have improved. But it was doing "fine" in bursts yesterday.

Is it possible that there's two problems going on here? Because it doesn't really make a lot of sense to me that if the battery was the problem, shouldn't the loss of power be constant?

The charging system doesn't do much below ~3-5k (still enough to maintain a good enough battery). So I think it might be possible for the bike to act all lazy in 'commute' mode, than get better when you twist the throttle a bit more if there is something up with your battery/charging system.

Quite often a battery on the way out may cause something else to fail.  Then again a dodgy electrical connector could be your issue...

A rule of thumb that has served me well in my job is that intermittent behaviour is usually something related to intermittent connection or condition (usually temperature), consistent behaviour is usually something actually broken.

I would recommend just going through the main connections from the battery back to the regulator, and the ignition harness to check for anything corroded or pinched.

As pointed out in previous posts, temperature affects batteries quite a bit too. If you have an older battery that is *Just* holding in there, high RPM or load could possibly result in a surging effect.  Easiest way to check is take up the revs a little higher when it starts to surge and see if you start to lose power.

Seems like a fuel starvation issue to me, battery power should not create surging.
Is there a fuel filter, does the problem go away on prime, if you open the fuel cap?


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