New Moto Guzzi Door Mats Available Now
I am confused by all these battery theories. Is moto guzzi doing something different? I have push started bikes with dead batteries, and jump started bikes with dead batteries and ridden the bikes for weeks like that when I was young. Once the bike is running, isn't the stator/alternator, and voltage regulator enough to keep the bike running?How would a dead battery or a poor connection to the battery kill the entire bike as if the main fuse was blown or the ignition was turned off? I guess I am missing something here.
A FWIW. Many many moons ago, before computer controlled cars. You could start a car/truck and remove the battery and it would still run and drive more or less normally. No, I don't remember if you could have the headlights on as well, but I think you could.Now that the computer controls everything and the voltage need to be "just right", I do not think that you can remove the battery anymore.To the OP, My money is on a bad ignition switch or if the dash has an ECU in it, the dash is failing when it gets warmed up.OP, good luck!!!!Tom
To the OP, My money is on a bad ignition switch...
Did the shop just clean the contact or replace the relay?
Hey DP, glad to hear of the positive (get it) outcome on your dilemma. Now to save what little sanity you may have left...
Drum Roll Please......and...It's fixed! I picked my V85 up from the shop, took it out for 80 or so miles worth of test rides on surface streets, mountain roads, and a bit of freeway, and it ran fine. I can live with this! I'm quite impressed with how the Spirit Motorcycles handled the problem I so blithely dumped on them. I handed their shop the Service Issue From Hell -- "Oh joy, an intermittent electrical problem! What could be more delightful? Can I get some root canal work instead?" -- and judging from their report, they had quite the adventure doing test rides to reproduce the problem. Which they eventually tracked down to......a bad connection to the so-called 'Primary Fuel Injection Relay'.Was this obvious? Yes and no. It was the obvious thing to check, but when I checked it myself, it seemed OK, which seems like a bit of cheating by the relay. The morals of this story may be:1) You fellows were right.2) I didn't check the relays carefully enough. Darn it.3) When pulling and replacing things to check connections, dielectric grease is your friend. I may have been living without the stuff since the Nixon Administration, but I really should buy a tube some day. I'll get around to it this time! Really! I promise!4) Ignore some of the names on the wiring diagram. They were translated into English from the Language of Machiavelli. The so-called 'Primary Injector Relay' doesn't actually connect to the fuel injectors. Instead, it seems to use a signal the key to close a circuit between the battery power and pin 40 on the ECU, and via a circuitous route, pin 42 as well. Both bear the cryptic label 'key input', which I now.. belatedly... understand to mean 'power supply'. The relay also seems to supply power to the Instrument Panel, Starter Relay, Secondary Injector Relay, Left and Right Lambda Probes, so much other stuff that I really need a beer before I try to track the rest down, which means it's more of a 'We Only Called It That To Fool You Relay'.Number 4 may be the take-away here. If the bike is shutting down and it seems like power to the ECU is getting cut off, the 'Primary Power To Pretty Much Everything On The Bike Except The Actual Injectors Relay' is indeed a potential culprit.
Does someone have a V85TT schematic from a different source?
Kudos for you Mr pilot, for sticking with it, and also for the dealer for actually finding it! Best of luck!Scott
The way I see it, one has to stay positive when things like this crop up. Yes, they can be annoying, but it doesn’t do much good to get angry, and when one has just dumped some diagnostic nightmare like an intermittent electrical problem in the shop’s lap (“Oh gee, thanks!”), it’s in everyone’s interest to get through the adventure with as little grief as possible. It helps that I have a very good shop that would be almost within walking distance if I didn’t mind walking 11 miles through west San Jose (see note above about, “Oh gee, thanks!” ), but even if I didn’t, the problem was going to get fixed, I was going to get a working bike back, and no matter how frustrating things might have seemed at the time, a few weeks down the road, this was all going to be just a great story.By way of comparison, thirty years ago, things went wrong while I was hang gliding at Big Sur (full story here) and as Ernest K Gann put it in Fate is The Hunter, I was granted a glimpse of something only a few dead men have seen. A wall of cloud formed between me and the LZ, I got whited out, spent several long minutes waiting for some unseen wall of rock to reach up and claw me out of the sky, and when I finally broke free, I had to stuff the glider on a hillside miles from nowhere. It took me two hours to crawl through thick brush to something that resembled a trail, and another three to find my way back to civilization. I wasn't entirely thrilled at the time (whimp!), but toward the end, as I was limping down the final stretch of ancient jeep trail, and it was clear I was going to survive, I thought, “Paul, you are having an adventure! People pay money to watch movies about adventures like this, and here you are, getting to have one for free! You should enjoy it!"I didn’t, of course But that thought did put things in perspective, and since then, I’ve tried not to take life too seriously.
creeping up the wires to foil relays or circuits. Urban legend IMO.
...keep Dielectric grease away from any relays or the wiring to them.
