Re: nighthawk 550 electrical problem
- From: "krusty kritter" <kriyamanna@xxxxxxx>
- Date: 25 Sep 2005 06:33:49 -0700
jlpridge wrote:
> Thanks for the information. I have checked the voltage of the battery
> when started and the voltage goes from 11.45 to 11.85 volts while you
> rev the engine. The battery voltage before I put it in the bike is
> 12.85. It does not take long for it to drop below 12volts.
That suggests a number of unpleasant possibilities. You may have an
open or shorted stator, really bad electrical connections or a shorted
battery cell, or the SCR or zener diode inside the RR unit are shorted
out.
Your alternator does not have a lot of power, maybe only 300 watts. If
you run the open circuit test I mentioned, you'll get around 90 to 120
volts between any pair of AC output wires.
But, even if the open circuit test proves the stator is OK, it still
doesn't have enough power to raise its own voltage much above the
battery voltage if there is a heavy load on the alternator, like a
shorted battery cell, a grounded SCR, or if there are blown diodes in
the rectifier.
> My question
> to you before I start attempting to test the diodes in the rectifier is
> should I wait until my Clymer manual gets here later this week to look
> at the schematics? I am really not sure which wire is what otherwise.
You don't have an owner's manual with a wiring diagram in the back?
If you follow the wire harness from the alternator to the rectifier, it
will go to one connector on the RR unit. That connector will probably
have three wires going into it, so those three wires will have three
pins in the connector. With a 3 phase alternator like your Honda has,
you can't go wrong on which AC input pin you stick your probe to on the
RR...
The other connector probably has two wires going to it. If it has three
wires, one of them is probably a sensor wire. Honda is the only company
I know of that runs a voltage sensing wire off to someplace else in the
instrument panel or headlight.
But, from looking at the DC output connector, you should easily be able
to figure out which is the DC positive output wire. It will be the same
color as the small wire going directly to the battery. It's probably
RED.
The DC negative output wire could be green or black. It's easy to tell
which is the DC output wire. If you probe it with the ohmmeter on the
RX1 scale, it should be grounded to the fame, so you'd get zero ohms
between the connector and the engine.
But all the above is to help you identify the pins on the RR unit
itself. That's what you want to be testing when you do the diode test.
> Also, while the bike is warming up it seems like the right bank of
> cyclinders are missing until the bike is warmed up.
That could be caused by dirty idle jets in the carburetors or you might
have some really bad electrical connectore. If the electrical
connectors in your wiring harness have dirty corroded pins that have
turned green, or even worse, have turned black and the plastic
connectors have begun to melt, the alternator can't charge the battery,
the electricity gets used up heating the connectors.
Every electrical connector will get hot, due to resistance. The more
connections you have, the more charging current is wasted in heating
those extra connections.
The Suzuki engineers did a number of strange things on my GS-1100 that
made it very hard to keep the battery charged.
One problem was that they used the stator and rectifier plugs that came
from the supplier. The stator wouldn't just plug directly into the
rectifier, the plug was wrong. So Suzuki made a short pigtail harness
that attached the stator to the wire harness and the rectifier plugged
into the pigtail harness too. That doubled the number of connections in
the charging circuit that could get hot and melt.
Suzuki also ran one wire from the stator up into the headlight shell to
a connector that had once gone to the headlight ON/OFF switch. Their
idea was that you didn't need all the output from the stator if the
headlight wasn't turned on...
Disconnecting one of the three stator leads in a three phase alternator
such as your Honda and my Suzuki have cuts the stator output in half.
But there hasn't been an ON/OFF switch on the handlebars for years.
Motorcycles sold in the USA must have their headlight on all the time.
So the Suzuki engineers put a jumper wire in the connector inside the
headlight shell so the electricity could travel all the way back to the
rectifier unit. And that little jumper wire got hot and it melted the
connector and kept that phase of the stator from charging my battery.
I was buying a new battery every year until I figured out that I needed
to cut off all the burned up coonnectors and solder the wires directly
together.
Honda owners have also been busy tracking down all the excess
connections in their charging circuits, cutting the connectors off,
stripping the wires, twisting them together and SOLDERING them together
to eliminate all the high resistance connections.
.
- References:
- nighthawk 550 electrical problem
- From: jlpridge
- nighthawk 550 electrical problem
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