I remember a similar intermittent charging issue on an RSV I worked on a few months ago. In the end I traced it back to the wiring for the reg/rec. The wiring loom had become crushed at some point and there were two wires shorting where insulation had melted.

That would be a nice easy fix, and cured by my plan to direct wire the alternator to the reg/rec as opposed to going across the engine, into the loom, back across the frame, and around the subframe rail!

Hi Em,

The only electrical issue I ever had was when the reg/rec failed. I replaced it with one from ebay and it was fine after that.

I put the voltage meter to keep an eye on what the reg/rec was doing - the replacement unit wasn't OEM and I wanted to know in advance if it started to fail too.

I never had any problems with the battery so didn't change it. It is possibly getting long in the tooth.

if i'm not mistaken you have two identical bikes, so you could just swap bits over until you find the cause. I see a lot of problems at work caused by temperature. For instance in out 175degC tools we had an issue where they would fail between 100 and 120degC, but rarely above or below that. poor soldering was the cause, not helped by using a high temperature grade solder [not so easy to work with]. So it could well be temperature related. Swapping parts could be the quickest way to finding the root cause.

No worries Paul, it has only started doing it recently so maybe it is as simple as the battery...

philfingers wrote:if i'm not mistaken you have two identical bikes, so you could just swap bits over until you find the cause. I see a lot of problems at work caused by temperature. For instance in out 175degC tools we had an issue where they would fail between 100 and 120degC, but rarely above or below that. poor soldering was the cause, not helped by using a high temperature grade solder [not so easy to work with]. So it could well be temperature related. Swapping parts could be the quickest way to finding the root cause.

Hey, why didn't I think of this?? Excellent plan - I think we'll have a look into this, cheers