Curvy Charging Nightmare!

[johnnyrod]

38W is less powerful than the headlights - are they drawing the right current? Might have a short circuit

[yorkie_chris]

Originally Posted by atassiedevil

Check your earths.
Holy trinity :-
Frame - battery
Battery - engine
Engine - frame

Get more than about 5-6 ohms resistance, there's your issue.
I would expect your battery, reg/rec and alternator to cope comfortably with more than 38w

Except it's an SV and the earth lead goes straight from battery to engine



Run another big, fused, live straight from reg-rec to battery if in doubt.

If you're getting crap contact somewhere and poor charging there are two places to look.

-one is inside the loom, this is where the main live is held together with a crimp, right in the vicinity of the fuse box... joins IIRC live from reg-rec, live to ignition (permanent live input to switch) and a live to the fuse box. It's in the fork in the loom near fuse box

-the main live connection to the starter relay and main fuse... these terminals can get snotted and/or melt and are not easy to replace... easier to just route it direct to the permanent live to the battery (can be done in starter relay to avoid loads of ring terminals on your battery!)

[yorkie_chris]

p.s a better way to look for bad charging contacts is rather than measure resistance (which would be minimal even if the contact area is the equivalent of a 0.1mm^2 cable).... measure the voltage across the wires.

For example, meter on low-ish voltage setting... one wire in back of reg-rec live connector other one on battery live... this tells you voltage drop across that wire. If you are losing a volt here that can be significant!

Example if your current draw... lets guess 15 amps (2x60w headlights, some grips, other stuff...)... that one volt is dissipating 15W. Which can be a fair bit of heat if it's all going on in one little connector.