duderadidea

RC stuff. nice.

Torco, son! they used to sponsor me with some free cases when I was racing dirt track more competitively. It's excellent stuff.

Nice, thanks. I've got the bike running and charging, but I can't help but still worry a little, so having some numbers to watch will be nice. Just to finish off the last post: I did some investigating trying to see what was causing that connector to heat up, and didn't find anything. I then went ahead and did the wiring mod that Zam started this whole thread with. I did the positive wires from the RR to the battery leads first, and that caused the pos side of the connector to stop heating up. Then I did the RR grounds to frame ground connection, and that completely solved the problem! I opted to skip the beefing up of the actual batt terminal-to-frame ground; the OEM is an 8 gauge wire, only about 7 inches long, and it looks to be in perfectly good shape. If anyone sez there's a good reason to beef up that connection, I will, but I put 140 miles on it on Sunday and everything checked out fine when I checked stuff at every stop. STOKED. Nothing better than a running Viffer.

Where are you ordering the voltmeter from? I gotta get myself one of those too...

I'm just going to put this out there in case anyone can offer some insight to my situation.. I just put my freshly rewound stator in, plugged in my brand new R/R from Rick's (really nice), and started it up. It runs fine, charges right around 14.5 from idle through 5k. So everything sounds right, right? Well, after about a minute of running, something started smoking. It was the connector with the 2 red and 2 green wires, between the R/R and the harness. It was heating up on the harness side. Basically, that's all I've got right now, it's dark outside and I'm going to get back into it tomorrow. Probably a bad ground, or a short? any advice on how to chase down this problem? It seems real weird to me... two weeks ago, I fried the connector on the stator side of the R/R, now it's frying the connector on the harness side.

So I'm sort of getting the impression that R/Rs are somewhat universal... Rather than spending $100 on a replacement for my 1st gen, I'm wondering what donor bikes I might be able to ebay a cheaper one from. CBRs? R1s? What's the deal with that?

Well, here's my situation. I've got similar symptoms to the ones at the very beginning of this thread; I pulled the bike out of the barn from winter storage on Sunday, put the battery in, which had been on the tender for about 8 hours. Didn't have enough juice to start the bike, so I plugged it back in to the tender and gave it a jump, at which point it started... idled for a few minutes... shut it off, then it started up again, but the battery was going on its 5th year, so I replaced it yesterday morning anyway with a brand new Interstate. As soon as I put the new battery in, I hit the road and blasted from Vermont to (almost) Rochester, NY. Had no problems until about 20 miles outside of Rochester, then it just shut off (at about 80mph all the way in the left lane) and wouldn't start again. I let it sit for a few minutes and then was able to bump start it and ride about 1/4 mile off the thruway. Got it back to my apartment, pulled the side covers today, and found that connector on the 3 yellow wires between the stator and the R/R totally melted, 2 of the wires actually burned through. Soo, new stator/RR/battery, no? It's got 43k miles on it, 25k of which are mine, and to my knowledge it's still got the original R/R, and presumably the original stator. So that's where it's at right now. Should I just go ahead and get an R/R from Rick's and have them rewind my stator? The weather was BEAUTIFUL today in Rochester, I was so bummed to not be riding to class.

So I haven't seen any firsthand reviews of the stuff from Rick's, except from Chris...? That stator has served you well? What about their R/Rs? It's lookin like I'm about to get into this on my '86, so I want to be sure I get the right stuff.