Modern Buddy

Just pulled my Stella 4T out of winter storage and noticed my turn signals (all of them) are dim to not functioning. Thinking this was caused by a bad battery I bought a new one had it charged up but there was no improvement. Also the gas gauge does not seem to be reading accurately (too low).

The headlight is working much better than with the old, more dead, battery but this new one didn't seem to do the job much better.

Some things to note:
-I received the battery and drove home (~30 min) and hooked it up. No improvement from the old battery.
-Battery was still warm from the acid addition.
-I hooked up the battery to a 2A charger (red to red, black to black) while installed on the bike. This started boiling the acid inside the battery, which I could see by the vapor coming out from the tubing. unplugged the charger immediately.
-Waited 10min and turned my scooter on with a kick. While leaving it running, I attached the charger and watched the charge meter go up slowly over the course of ~30min the charge went from 25% to 75%.
-Then I had to go get gas. So I drove it to the station then back home, where it sits now unplugged and off.


Did I get a bad battery? When I was playing around with trying to charge the old one is it possible that I damaged a circuit on the bike? Are my lights just bad (they are all very dim)?

Follow directions in this tech manual:

http://www.yuasabatteries.com/pdfs/TechManual_2014.pdf

I think you are still having battery issues. I'm not sure your new battery was bad but after your charging method it might be. Read over this manual and figure out if you have a sealed or conventional battery. There are different ways to treat it. This manual should help. Good luck!

Since you don't need a charged battery to run the scooter, why would they still be dim when the engine was running?

ArgonV wrote:Since you don't need a charged battery to run the scooter, why would they still be dim when the engine was running?

Because the stator doesn't produce enough watts at idle to power the headlight, taillight, and turn signals.

Correct ArgonV, you don't. I forgot. Thanks for setting me straight.

I took a second look at the wiring diagram and a bad AC/DC regulator, magneto or bad connection to the regulator magneto might be an issue. If you have a service manual you can follow steps on page 33 and 34 to troubleshoot. You'll need a digital multimeter that can read true RMS, a copy of the wiring diagram, pg 20 of the service manual.

I suspect this because I'm assuming you can still run the scooter with battery disconnected as you indicated in first post. This tells me your CDI unit, HT coil and pick up coil are working properly to run the scoot. Any of these not working scoot won't run. If your battery is fully charged, Lights will run off battery. I don't suspect a magneto, since your running CDI, so its possible you fried the regulator with your charger.

I don't know if you've ever had problems with mice in your area but I have and they like to chew the wires of my trailer for some reason. Had to replace those twice. Maybe just look around the scoot real good and make sure they didn't do that to you. That's all I can think of.

Neurotic-Hapi-Snak wrote:

ArgonV wrote:Since you don't need a charged battery to run the scooter, why would they still be dim when the engine was running?

Because the stator doesn't produce enough watts at idle to power the headlight, taillight, and turn signals.

Mine does just fine at idle. Perhaps the idle is too low?

Sounds basic, but did you check the fuse?