What’s Wrong With My Bike?
Despite what the guy at the shop told me, Roy thinks the battery is the problem.
After that ride that wasn’t I got home OK but I still needed to figure out why my bike didn’t want to start. I figured–and hoped–it was just the battery.
I removed the seat on the CB750 and pulled the battery and then took it over to Batteries Plus and asked them to test it. I had forgotten it is a gel-pack battery and it had a sticker on it that said “7-18” which I took to be July 2018. So that’s five years, but I would expect a gel-pack might last longer. I googled that question and found that six years is considered typical. Fine, I’m not going to quibble.
At Batteries Plus the guy first did a simple meter test, and that was fine, so he did a load test. When a guy at a battery shop tells you your battery is good you kind of tend to believe him. They’re there to sell batteries and if he tells you he doesn’t need to sell you a battery I’m generally going to believe him. And what he told me was that the battery was fine, though it could stand to be charged.
So that’s good news that I don’t have to buy a new battery but it’s bad news because not I have to figure out what the real problem is. And I am now a skilled mechanic. But I know that Roy knows a lot more about these things than I do so I called him. He said he could come over the next morning and in the meantime I put it on the trickle charger overnight.
Come morning I put the battery back in the bike and hit the starter. It roared to life instantly. OK. Now I’m thinking alternator. We’ll see what Roy thinks after he does some testing.
Roy arrived and we got to it. The battery definitely had a charge, no question about that. But was the alternator feeding it power? The meter said yes it was. Roy had me start it, stop it, let the lights burn while the motor was off–all this stuff, testing this and that.
In the end he arrived at the same place he had been when he got started. Despite what the guy at the shop told me, he believes it is the battery. It might not be all the way dead yet but he figures a five-year-old battery is probably the problem.
Where this leaves me is that I will go on riding the bike with this battery and I’ll be observing. I’ll keep it on the trickle charger but after taking it out I’ll see if it is slower to start, indicating that the battery is draining. And maybe sometime soon it will be bad enough that I’ll pull it again and take it to the shop again and they’ll tell me it needs to be replaced. I don’t know what else to do.
Biker Quote for Today
No plans. No maps. No GPS. No rules. Just ride.
Tags: Honda CB750 Custom
