Re: Bike won't start and it did yesterday. Leave in 5 days for a 1700 mile round trip
BTW, I believe the battery testers that most of the auto parts stores have are designed for car batteries, only. I have a cheap Harbor Freight version. They put a heck of a load on a small MC battery. A brand new MC will test "Weak" using one of these testers. BUT, the "Weak" reading will hold steady and won't take a nose-dive while applying the load. That basically means the MC battery passes as "GOOD" when using a car battery tester.
Another BTW : I was working on a friend's car a while back. She is about 82 years old and thinks she knows everything. I told her her battery was bad. It had a real interesting intermittent problem. I think it had an intermittent connection inside the battery. Sometime it would start, and other times I only got a "click" from the starter solenoid. She insisted the battery was good, since it was only about a year and a half old. I knew the battery was bad - it was obvious, since finally I got it to kinda act like yours; read about 12.6 volts without a load, but with the ignition and headlights on, it read only about 8 volts. What was really interesting was the headlights looked fairly bright with only 8 volts present. Anyway, I finally convinced her to replace the battery. I found the receipt for her battery in the glovebox - it was 7 years old.
