TOPIC:

Motor Head wrote:

79MKII wrote: In my case the R/R was just wired incorrectly...I had the output feeding into the brown wire instead of the battery.

In KZRage's case though, it sounds like a faulty regulator and the diode would be worth trying.

so you had the Red/ White striped wire out of the R/R hooked into the Brown wire circuit? How long was it like that? The RW is like 12 gauge and the Br is only 16 or something. The RW would try to recharge the battery through the BRN back through the Ign switch and fuse panel, back through he main fuse, to Batt +

In my case I thought I had ordered a "regulator only" since my rectifier is external and was working perfectly. I spliced the 5 regulator wires into the original regulator harness and plugged it right in. I found out this week that I actually received a R/R. The R/R has a red wire, a black wire and 3 yellow wires. All wires are the same gauge, btw. I hooked up the black to ground, the 3 yellows to the 3 stator wires (blue, pink and yellow) and that left the red and the brown. Perfect fit! Luckily, even though the R/R was installed nearly 2 years ago, the motorcycle has been ridden very little since then, probably 2 or 3 miles at the most.

The 5-wire reg/rec is theoretically superior to the 6-wire, as long as the 5-wire does not drain the battery when the bike is shut off.

This is because the 5-wire senses the battery directly and regulates accordingly. The 6-wire system senses battery voltage through the brown wire which may have a voltage loss along it's long path. This voltage drop will cause the regulator to send higher voltage to the battery than the battery wants. This is not good for more sensitive batteries.

If there exists a reliable 5-wire reg/rec combo, that would be preferred over the 6-wire, as long as price is not much more, and as mentioned, does not drain the battery.

The idea that some 6-wire reg/recs mioght actually work as a 5-wire was only a guess. It's because if you have a reliable 5-wire (3-phase) reg/rec combo, then the 6-wire version is just a waste of an extra wire. I was guessing that the 6-wire version actually uses 5-wire circuit, but they just add an extra (brown) wire to make it match up to the harness. To make the brown lead functional, they could just connect it through a diode or something. And that is the part I suspected may have failed. (Causing the non-shut-off symptom.) In that case, there is a chance that all you would need to do is disconnect the brown wire and the reg/rec may still work. But it is a dangerous experiment since the voltage may go fully unregulated. Not sure it's worth trying since you wouldn't want to use it permanently that way anyway, since there is something broken in the reg/rec.

I'd think it would be as bad as not having the battery in the circuit to act like a "Surge Tank" for excess current. I can see blown lightbulbs and damage/destruction of the electronic ignition(If you have one) and damage to the points system too.

Well here's a thought, if the Brown lead is indeed the sensing wire and the White/red is just to keep the battery receiving a charge based on what is seen on the Brown lead and thus the entire bikes electrics up to 12+ VDC at all times when the bike is running, then since the White/red wire and Brown wire get connected in the ignition switch why couldn't I just connect them back at the battery or even maybe closer to the R/R? I realize that the potential is that the output of the R/R to the battery would be "seen" on the Brown wire as 12-14.5 VDC but since the White/red wire is being drained by a running bike then the potential (current drain) on that line should be high and as the battery will not be outputting anything near 12-14.5 VDC with that drain the current flow should be sensed by the R/R through the White/red wire and as such not shunt power to ground but allow flow to the White/red wire.

Fellow Sparky's, any thoughts on this idea?

EDIT: I just remembered that my FSM has a diagram of the Brown wire internally in the R/R I'm pretty sure, I'll check it and post something later

KZ_Rage wrote: Well here's a thought, if the Brown lead is indeed the sensing wire and the White/red is just to keep the battery receiving a charge based on what is seen on the Brown lead and thus the entire bikes electrics up to 12+ VDC at all times when the bike is running, then since the White/red wire and Brown wire get connected in the ignition switch why couldn't I just connect them back at the battery or even maybe closer to the R/R? I realize that the potential is that the output of the R/R to the battery would be "seen" on the Brown wire as 12-14.5 VDC but since the White/red wire is being drained by a running bike then the potential (current drain) on that line should be high and as the battery will not be outputting anything near 12-14.5 VDC with that drain the current flow should be sensed by the R/R through the White/red wire and as such not shunt power to ground but allow flow to the White/red wire.

Fellow Sparky's, any thoughts on this idea?

EDIT: I just remembered that my FSM has a diagram of the Brown wire internally in the R/R I'm pretty sure, I'll check it and post something later

The reason they used a switched wire (brown) to power the regulator as the sense wire, is because it may slowly drain the battery when the bike is off if it was permanently wired to the battery.

There is a way to design a regulator where it won't use any power if the voltage is below the cutoff (14.5v or so). That type regulator doesn't need the switched sense wire, so it is found in the 5-wire (3-phase), or 4-wire (1-phase) reg/rec combos. This type, while being able to combine the sense line to the output wire, wouldn't necessarily have to be used that way. It could still be used as a 6-wire reg/rec combo.

Either way will work. Ideally, the 5-wire method is preferred since this eliminates the voltage difference between output wire and sense wire. (That is the voltage difference between the battery and the brown wire for which the coil relay-mod is designed to cover up.) This can give better precision in charging the battery. However, if something fails in the regulator portion, it's possible that it will drain the battery. The 6-wire version would protect against that, if it's a true 6-wire circuit. If it's a 5-wire circuit posing as a 6-wire, there would be no protection of this type, and it would behave as a 5-wire.

Well I'm going to give another one of the same R/R's another go, hopefully it will get here before the weekend is past as I want to shake the bike down a bit before going to the MotoGP with it.

Part of the reason I decided to go this route was what loudhvx posted in another thread (excerpted)...

"If a battery becomes unconnected while riding down the highway... But the regulator pulses don't get filtered by the battery anymore so the regulator loses regulation...The result is, at highway speeds, the bike will get too much voltage.... The regulator may actually get damaged.

The reason the voltage goes so high is because a voltage regulator regulates based on average voltage. Without a battery or capacitor to smooth out the alternator pulses, the RMS voltage goes very high, without necessarily having the average voltage getting very high."

I did find on more than one occasion that one or both of my battery screws were a tiny bit loose and one time the neg was very loose. I'm correcting that with different screws and as part of the correction I plan to use a very, very small dab of blue loctite.

If the reg was having to dump all of the stators output to ground then the heat sink of the R/R would have probably been insufficient for that level and length of time causing the thermal breakdown of the diode. It's all theory of course as it could have been just a bad diode from the beginning.

This one is for the "sparky's" here... think this pretty well explains the whole issue!

KZ_Rage wrote: This one is for the "sparky's" here... think this pretty well explains the whole issue!

That pretty much sums it all up.

OK, got the R/R Friday from Z1E again, and I noticed it's a Rick's same as the last one. I installed a separate ground lead that goes from one of the mounting bolts on the R/R up to the secondary battery ground lead connection point. I also cut down some SS socket head bolts to mount the R/R as the old stock ones showed some rust on the threads. Lastly I cut down some more of the same bolts for the battery terminals, cleaned up some more wiring and generally feel pretty good right now about the state of the harness. Started it up and monitored the regulators output and it was right on the money @ 4k.

Tomorrow I'm going to do a little tinker on the carbs (not as much as I had planned) and then go for a ride to see how things go. Hopefully all goes well for my next report back to put this thread to bed.