Man, What A Day...

[Stretch]

Good catch, Stretch. You wouldn't like the Strom. My brothers and I rented one for a week and didn't like it for a variety of reasons, one of them was that it is very short. Not the one for you.

Back to your episode, you thought the burned connector was poor quality, but are you sure? Was the problem possibly a side effect of the Sasquatch voltage fix? I expect to "do the fix" some day and just have to ask.

I rented a Wee in Alaska a couple years ago.  It was sturdy, but I was glad to get home to my Tiger.

I don't think the Sasquatch Voltage Fix had anything to do with it, as the connector in question was between the stator and regulator / rectifier.  The Sasquatch Fix is on the other side of the RR, between it and the battery.  

All the Sasquatch Fix does is to use a few inches of large-gauge wire to bypass a few feet of small-gauge wire between the regulator and the battery, cutting down on voltage-robbing resistance.

The stator puts out quite a bit of Alternating Current at much higher voltage.  The Rectifier converts the Alternating Current to Direct Current, and the Regulator cuts the voltage down to levels that won't cook the battery.

If the stator output was excessive, and the connector had no internal resistance, the wires between the stator and RR would have cooked along it's entire length.  But the wiring was fine... only the connector got hot.

This afternoon, I soldered every single connection between the stator and Sasquatch Fix and ran the bike for fifteen minutes or so.  The wires were all nice and cool.  If there were a problem resulting in excessive output, it would have popped the in-line fuse in the Positive wire of the Sasquatch Fix.

[HappyMan]

Geeze Stretch, I'm gone out of town for a few days and I catch this thread!!  I almost shed a tear and then I almost made you an offer for your bike.  :roll:

Glad you worked it out or so it looks like you did.  

[Bixxer Bob]

Stretch,  a couple of points:  first I know that let-down feeling well - my Honda Blackbird was rock solid reliable for 48k miles, then the bubble burst with a spate of minor electrical niggles.  Mostly low tension and easy to fix but shattering from the confidence point of view.  Next, I had  a stator failure - like the Tiger it's a known problem on early FI models and it took out the regulator, but I think it was caused by... yep you guessed..... burnt out spade connectors just like yours.  I think that poor contact at this point is the source of many of these failures, although the Honda dealer says its bound to happen eventually due to generating 30 amps or so in a closed case with no vent or cooling.  One high-resistance connector overworks one phase of the stator, you get an imbalance and that does for the regulator.  (Only an amateur point of view, open for discussion).  Glad you seem to have sorted it anyway.  :?

[Stretch]

I put about thirty miles on it today running some errands, and it made 14.5 - 14.6 VDC above 3000 rpm.  Jam up.  

All the charging system wires were normal temperature (same as everything else under there, with the cases, radiator and exhaust convecting their heat on everything.)  I rode with the left side panel removed, allowing air to flow to the RR.  It did run a bit cooler, naturally.

I have a 2,000+ mile trip coming up in a couple weeks, and I have decided to go ahead and swap in my spare stator and RR, just to be on the safe side.  As sensitive as an electronic regulator is to overloading, I don't want to take a chance.  I will cut off all the connectors and solder the connections together to build a one-piece harness that includes the stator, RR, and Sasquatch Fix.

I'm also going to run an additional wire parallel with each existing wire... for example, take one of the three stator-to-RR wires... leaving the wire in place and uncut, remove a half-inch of insulation from the stator end near the rubber plug, and then do the same near the rubber plug on the RR end.  Then run a new wire of the same size parallel with the existing wire, connecting each end to the bare spots you made in the existing wire, and soldering the connections.  Do this with every single wire in the charging system, eliminating any overload in the small existing wires, and in doing so eliminating the heat caused by resistance.

Read here:  http://www.vfrdiscussion.com/forum/inde ... 29975&st=0

I'm also going to move the RR to the outside of the bike, to get it into the breeze.  I read somewhere that for every 10˚C reduction in an electronic component's temperature, it's life span doubles.  Sign me up.  More on that later.