I'd check the charging system and battery health.
Steve
+1 But not in that order.
The easiest way to determine if your problem is electrical or fuel related - install a on-board voltmeter, permanently or temporarily. If you see your voltage drop under 12.5 or so at lights, it's your battery/charging system at fault.
I had the same symptoms - great voltage after starting, but the bike would begin to stumble, sometimes die, at traffic lights. I was using a six year old PC 680, that would hold a charge of about 12.5 volts, so I dismissed that as the problem.
I then monitored the battery voltage while the bike was parked, from cold to normal operating temperature. Sure enough, the voltage would gradually drop off, regardless of what load there was on the bike (headlight, fan, brake lights, running lights).
Next came the complete
Electrosport Fault-Finding process. To the letter.
The stator and the regulator tested fine, both under cold and hot conditions. The last line of the process reads something like this;
"If all of the above checks out, the fault can only be a defective battery"
But I still didn't believe it was the battery, based on the voltage after charging (read after letting the bike sit overnight). So I replaced the stator.
Same problem. Poor voltage after heating up. So next came a new PC680.
Problem solved! Now I get 14.0 - 14.8 volts, hot or cold, depending on the load being placed on the system.
If I had gone to the
Odyssey website, before changing out the stator, I would have learned that a PC680 at 12.4-12.5 volts is actually only
half charged. And that a 100% charged one reads at least 12.8. And probably just as important - a dry-cell battery has a
very slow failure rate - which in my case tricked me into believing the battery was still good.
Bottom line - suspect your battery as the cause of the charging system problem. Get it load-tested . Even if that checks out, if the battery is more than four years old, replace it with a dry-cell.
Cheers!
