2023-04-16 Welcome Spring!!!

I'd been a bit lazy, for when my Versys let me down in the fall of last year, no longer charging the battery and leaving me high and dry at Gas's grocery store in New Haven Prince Edward Island, Caroline helped me collect it, and we stuck it into her garage, where it has sat on a battery tender over the winter.

 

There is a real danger of ice today
It's 1C / 34F today!
Brrrrr!

I'd pulled into Gas' and refilled with the engine off, and the trouble began when the motor failed to start after paying and grabbing a couple of things. The owner of the store loaned me a battery boost pack big enough to jump start a truck, so it had no problem boosting the Versys back to life, but try as I might, I could get no clear indication that the battery was charging, and when I pulled the pack off, the bike would die immediately. Caroline arrived with her Klein Digital Multimeter and I proved that the battery wasn't taking a charge conclusively, so returned the pack and made arrangements to leave the bike and pick it up the next day. **Sigh. 

It was still September, so once we rolled the bike off the trailer and into Caroline's garage, I thought I'd have tons of time to repair it, but was truly dreading the cost, as a new stator and regulator could be over $1000 easily if you were buying OEM parts, but then along came Hurricane Fiona, the nasty beotch, and bikes were a thing of dreams for a bit there while we tried to put the island back together post storm. The the snow set in and there was always an excuse not to be outside freezing one's digits off. I finally got off my butt, read some online "How-To" material and decided I needed a definitive test of the bikes stator, but there is so much information on the topic that it becomes pretty overwhelming, and I may not have had the best meter in the world when I found that with the stator disconnected at the wiring harness plastic connector, a three wire, spade set up, that each leg of the stator was making more than 15VAC with respect to frame ground, and that increased as the revolutions went up.

ElectroSport Stator
ESG638 Stator Kawasaki ZX-6R/ZX-6RR
https://www.electrosport.com/collections/street-motorcycles-kawasaki-2009-versys-650/products/esg638-stator-kawasaki-zx-6r-zx-6rr

 Good, so electrically the stator was okay so the regulator rectifier must be to blame, right? WRONG!!! That stupid connector... one of the spades was "make or break" and that meant that the output to the battery was fine on two legs, but on the regulator rectifier side of the connector one of the legs was not making voltage at all, so it took a spade terminal and female terminal replacement to square it away in no time flat. 

Excessive arcing caused be a "too loose" connector. 

Darn it! I could have ridden well into Fall last year, but I'd mis diagnosed the problem and thought it was a much more expensive fix. 

The red size is about all you will need for a Versys
Unless you are dealing with battery cables :)

Well, procrastination works, and here I am riding it as a daily commuter while my Honda Civic gets it's yearly inspection and tune up by Nicholson's Garage in Darlington PEI where Eldred and Kevin are hard at work trying to keep that old machine on the road so I have a sled for those snowy days when you need four wheels on the ground. 

While my friends in Ontario have been camping already, I'm old enough and smart enough to wait for warmer weather for that, plus I still have to redo my fork seals and brake pads up front as well. On a bike that is now fourteen years old, you have to expect a few wee problems here and there, don't you? 

Shiny side up!!!

UPDATE: 2023-09-16

It was worse than I thought, and the bike ran okay for a bit, but I lost the use of my headlight, changed out the bulb to find out it was the relay not "latching" on due to insufficient battery/stator output. Much later that summer I had to ask my girlfriend to trailer my dead bike back to the apartment, where I put it on a charge, and ordered in a battery from Bolger Motorsports, the Kawi dealer. 
It wasn't the battery. I needed to bite the bullet and order in a new Stator, and Regulator/Rectifier (heavy duty Mosfet version this time) that got installed first weekend in September.)
So after a new "Trifecta" of electrical parts, the bike is running well and I can now pull over and kill the engine knowing that the AGM battery is going to have the juice to start the bike, and power my heated grips, high beams, and heated jacket, or charge a battery bank for moto camping later on that day. Win win but it exhausted my wallet, and cost me a planned trip to visit family in September, sadly. But having a reliable scoot back under me is a true joy, and I mean to get the most use I can out of it before the end of the riding season, which for me will be when it snows and sticks around with night time temps below zero, and daytime highs of less than 4 degrees Celsius. 

Cheers!

The Definition of a committed relationship is...

Two batteries on the same charger for the off-season

And you will be happy to know that are back in their respective motorcycles for the upcoming 2019 season. I can't wait to get out there and get riding!

Electrickery and the Versys Stator

A couple of weeks ago I was returning to Prince Edward Island from a trip to Ontario to visit family, friends and attend Round 5 of the Canadian Super Bike races CSBK, when my charging system died and left me stranded on the roadside just outside of Quebec City on QC Route 138, the South Shore.

 I have to admit it's my own darned fault as I have a volt charge level indicator that I installed on the V back when I first bought it in 2013, and it was giving me warning signs earlier this season, but the bike was still running well, and it wasn't until that morning when it told me that I was "breaking even" on charge, then later on, "discharging" as opposed to the "charging" that I was used to. I'd become complacent as to the reliability of this bike, for it's not failed on me for the fives years and 70,000km that I've owned it.

Anyhow, I couldn't get a stator shipped to Quebec City in time to make it worth my while remaining there while it was serviced at the dealership, so I towed it back to the Island and stuck it away in the garage, and ordered an aftermarket stator from FortNine.ca as well as a couple of new Shinko 705 tires as they were pretty much toast at 10k.

Dead at 83,000km and 9 years of service

First I dropped the oil, then tried to remove the side case. Tried. There is a magnet in there that really had a good grip on that stator, so I needed a extra bit of mechanical leverage to break the grip of the old gasket material and that magnet.

Starter driven gears add to the complexity

Right. I now had an easy task of removing the old stator and installing the aftermarket RM Stator, being very careful to route the wires so the counter weight rotor and magnet would never come near the wiring as it spins in very close proximity to the harness.

$200 compared to OEM $500

Rick's Motorsport stators come well reviewed, and I had a friend or two that suggested I'd never need to worry about the stator again once installed.

Once again, I'll stress that routing the wiring properly is the single most important thing you can do.

This is where you need to be careful and install the cable under the retention plate

I've learned that nine dollars worth of dielectric grease goes a long way, and I never separate a connector without using a dab or two to waterproof them.

dielectric grease for the win!

I used a razor blade scraper to carefully remove old gasket material and sealant to create a good mating surface for the new OEM Kawasaki gasket that I had in hand, all $12.56 worth of oil retaining goodness.

I back scraped with this, as scraping forward might shave off case aluminium 

This created a bunch of debris that wants to fall onto the counter weight, and into the new stator, so have a rag or two handy to cover and clean the parts.

Out with the old and in with the new

Time to grab that gasket and see if I can get it back together again...

$12.56 OEM side cover gasket, metallic

Bugger was that side cover hard to get back on! First the gasket is metallic and would stick to the giant magnet pulling it out of shape and into the case itself.

Second, those gear teeth would NOT line up, especially as the magnet would grab hold of the stator and pull strongly from the bottom so I had enormous difficulty putting the case on perfectly vertically.

Third, those gear teeth refused to line up with the starter shaft and locating holes, and the gear pins didn't like locating into the side cover again.

A little high temp silicone for the rubber wiring harness, just in case

And that flipping gasket! No sooner would you get the cover almost on when it would slip out of alignment and stick against the giant magnet again!

I think I had the old cover and stator off and the new one installed in the case in under an hour, but getting perfect alignment of the side cover and gasket to get it to mate seemed to take two hours! Done! It finally mated correctly after I got pissed at the gasket and dabbed a bit of silicone on so it would tack onto the block and stay put for two seconds!

Now to fill it with oil and see where my charge levels were with the new stator.

It's ALIVE

And it's better than it was before. Indicating discharge at under 2000 rpm, break even between 3000 and 2000 rpm, and green glorious green when at around 3000 rpm!

Discharge at idle is normal

You are looking at the voltage indicator installed on the right "dash" panel, the red light indicates discharge at 1350 rpm.

Lift off! We have Lift Off!!!

I revved it up to over three grand, and the indicator shows charging! Coming off the throttle shows continuing to charge even at 2500 rpm.

Fantastic, and just in time for the long weekend!

UPDATE: 2019-08-09

Almost a year and 10,000 kilometres later, the RM Stator is still doing it's job and I'm a happy camper. No complaints.

UPDATE: 2020-08-14

I ran an extension from my battery tender cord up into my tank bag so that I could either charge a power bank or cell phone in the tank bag while touring, or I would be able to plug my heated gear into a "high" connection, and not have to sit on that infernal coiled cord. It was okay for short trips, but would really bother my inner thigh if I put some miles on, plus I'd inadvertently smack the switch off at times. Moving it higher up and routing it through the fairing was the perfect solution. 

BUT, I messed up the stator connector from the RM stator (white female end) to the bike's regulator/rectifier side (black male). At first the symptom was dead easy to sort out. The bike stopped charging and almost left me and my girlfriend with a dead bike in a parking lot five minutes from home! My troubleshooting fixed that problem by repairing the female portion of the connector, or so I thought. 

Pictured below is the connector as it appeared in May after I'd messed up and knocked it about while running that extension. You can clearly see the arcing on the one connector. I thought I had it sorted out and the bike was charging again. 

Arcing on the one spade connector

 At rest with a freshly charged battery, I was getting 12.35 VDC at the battery tender cable.

Once I'd sorted out that connector by slipping in the blade of my pocket knife and squeezing it closed a bit, the bike was charging again! Sweet! Done like dinner.

Fast forward to August when my headlights stopped working. First the low beam, the bulb had blown, and I sorted that the old fashioned way with a trip to Canadian Tire and $18 dollars. Then both low-beam and high-beam failed on me, and while reading a thread on kawasakiversys.com I found that checking the stator lead would be a good start, and low and behold I found the arcing was more severe, and that when I'd squeezed the connector back together in May, it had made contact, but had pushed the female terminal out of the white shell. It was a poor high resistance connection that was "Makin' and a Breakin'" all night long.. Darn it!

I really need to replace the lower connection completely but I settled for ensuring a good solid connection on all three of the terminal leads, and at this time, everything is running the way it ought to. My girlfriend Caroline is going to fetch along some of her butt and spade connectors in her tools just in case she needs to fix my broken bike. :)