Hey everyone!

I've been having a long term issue with my bike dying after 20 minutes of riding or less: tach starts jumping, finally drops to 0; the bike dies. After about 5-10 min. the bike will start again, and I can get home.

At the suggestion of a local mechanic, I swapped over EFI boxes (I mean the little black one with lots of wires coming out of it next to the battery, not sure if EFI is the right name  ) as well as regulators with a friend of mine who has the same bike. The black box didn't help, but when I put the regulator on, it ran like a charm! Got up to 6k and pulled and pulled! woot! 

However, I've been around this bike WAAY too long to expect the answer to be that easy. My question is: is the problem actually the regulator, or was the regulator being fried a symptom of a different problem? A bad battery? A wire short? where should I look for that? I really don't want to tear apart my whole harness, but I will if that's necessary.

PS I found one wire under the previously mentioned black box that looked like it had been flattened underneath the box when some POS PO had put it on. Is that possibly my issue?

Thanks!

Menno

What's the regulator? Is that the regulator rectifier?

Yep - R/R. And chances are the "efi box" was the cdi box.

Menno, the R/R isn't a known problem on a GS500. But it is possible that the wiring was damaged, and that caused it to fail. It's a good idea to check your battery voltage at idle, and around 5k rpm.

Many bikes have poorly designed rectifiers, and many newer bikes have a better MOSFET design.  If you can see your R/R, check the markings on the side to see if it starts with SH or FH.  SH is old school, and FH is MOSFET.    The good news is you can get one off of another bike (cheaply on ebay) and put it on your bike pretty easily.  I did my Honda VFR800 and my Honda Superhawk, and used a 2005 ZX10 R/R for each of those.



For more information on this, and a list of which bikes you can use the R/R from, bookmark this link... 
Written by someone much smarter than me.  I read and tried to understand it until my head hurt, then I took his word for it and went to the list of known good R/R components.

http://www.superhawkforum.com/forums/knowledge-base-40/mosfet-regulator-rectifiers-why-how-25117/

Rich, I was wondering if perhaps it wasn't the R/R. I found an interesting post from a while back about checking the various electrical components, think I'll do a rundown of that stuff at some point. Thanks for the help!

Look at the negative lead where it clamps to the battery, an inch or so below the main terminal you will see another smaller terminal coming out of the loom. Make sure this is clean and tight.

Its the ground for the ignition module and if it isn't making good contact with the battery all sorts of weird shaZam! can happen. I cant say for certain this is the reason for your problem but its a possibility and it easily checked.