Well, the verdict is in. It was the battery. Diagnostics showed everything else to be in perfect order. I learned something today, and except for a Goldwing rider, every guy I know at work with a bike did not know this either.
Until you are at about 3000rpm, give or take, your battery is discharging. During long idle times, low rpm “puttering” along and quick trips, the battery isn’t accepting any charge. The older the battery, the quicker you can run it down to nothing. If I had been running on a new battery, I would have been fine. But my battery was on the downslope of its life and my 20 minutes of idling while chatting with another rider before leaving work, a couple side street miles, and 45 minutes or so of freeway idling drained the battery to “empty”, and the engine quit. Idling is no different than just turning the key on and walking away. Draining to complete fail, combined with being on its last year, it wouldn’t even accept a charge at the shop. So even if I had tried it, jump starting it wouldn’t have worked. While in traffic, shutting down and starting up each time traffic moved would have done the same thing, burning up any saved juice on the starts. Pulling over until traffic cleared would have saved me.
Had I known about this possibility, I would have been able to prevent it. A couple months ago I almost bought a Battery Monitorbut didn’t, figuring that while it might be useful for Wings and such with multiple light bars, CBs, Intercoms, Radios, CD changers, Heated Grips, etc, it would just have been a cool light for a daily commuter. Well, I can tell you that I have one on order now. If I’d had one of those last week, I would have had a heads up before it was too late. When I asked about them, the service manager agreed that he thinks every bike should come factory equipped with a monitor or volt meter. With our itty bitty alternators and tiny batteries that can, and often do, go to hell without physical warning like in a car, they could save a lot of headache.
It is both enlightening and annoying to me that a nugget of information that I feel I should have known, and perhaps at one time did but completley forgot, and/or a $25 part that I almost bought prior to this could have saved me a couple hundred bucks, several pulled muscles, dehydration, a lot of stress, a wasted weekend and a week’s worth of riding time.
Don’t let what happened to me happen to you! While my situation was a worse case scenario, it apparently is not uncommon, according to the shop. Most times excessive idle times or a few quick trips result in the battery being dead the next day on startup, rather than while running, but it can and does happen. Use this knowledge wisely, grasshoppers.
I haven’t driven a car on the freeway for a couple months until this happened. It’s SCARY!! I have mere INCHES separating me from people next to me! 