My tale:
Went to start the KLR this past Monday after it sat for a week and a half or so. Just got a buzzing from the starter relay when I pushed the button.
Put it on the Battery Tender and in about 8 hours it was fully charged again. I thought this was unusual. I should have trusted my instincts, but kind of chalked it up to a battery going bad since mine is 3 years old.
Rode it to work and back (about 60 miles) on Tuesday. No problems.
Rode it to to work today. It fired right up this morning. It sat in the parking lot for 9 hours or so. Started right up when I went to leave. Rode it about 2 miles to another place and it sat there for about an hour and a half.
Came out to start it and nothing: no buzzing from the starter relay; no lights of any kind.
Shit. By now I'm starting to believe maybe there's a problem with the battery. The wife is still in town, so I call her and she drives over there and I try to jump-start it. With the cables connected, bright lights again but nothing but a buzzing from the relay. Leave the cables on for about 15 minutes: no improvement.
By now I'm into full Worst Case Scenario Mode because I can't really leave the thing where it is, and even if we go get the Toyota and ramps, I don't think my wife and I can get it up in the back of it unless it's running and moving under its own power.
I decide to call around town to see if, by any slim chance, anybody has a battery that's at least somewhat charged. So, I pull the battery out so I can read the part number and call about 4 places. One of them carries the battery, but they're all still dry in the box.
I'd looked at the terminals while waiting on the wife and checked to make sure they were tight. I now started looking at them more closely and they seemed to have a slight bit of corrosion: nothing glaring but there was kind of a film on them.
So, before the night really starts to suck, I decide to take a flat-tip screwdriver and scrape the terminals and connectors, then try it again. So, I scratched them up all up with the flat tip and put the battery back in.
Near-disaster when I hooked up the negative cable to the wife's battery and was greeted with sparks and yanked it away real quick as the wife got all excited that we were making progress and yelled, "Hey! It didn't do that before!"
I then realized that I'd gotten flustered and was trying to hook the cable that was attached to the KLR's positive battery terminal to the negative terminal on the Durango. Mucho Stupido, there. I'm probably damned lucky I didn't burn up some wiring or at the least blow a fuse.
Switched the cables back to the proper polarity and tried it again and, voila, the KLR fired right up.
So, in the end, while I like my little pigtail I keep attached to the battery I use to hook up the Battery Tender, not removing the battery on a regular basis led me to neglect the terminals. Just because there's no corrosion on the outside doesn't mean there's not corrosion between the battery post and the connector where you can't see it.
My theory is that the corrosion prevented the KLR's rather anemic charging sytem from getting a good flow of electricity into the battery and it gradually degraded to the point where it didn't have enough oomph to trigger the starter relay. The start when I left work today was probably its last gap and I was doomed when I shut it off at my next destination.
After I charged it with the Tender on Monday, it was okay for awhile, but it caught back up with me again today. There was obviously enough corrosion there that it prevented a good jump-start from the wife's Durango that was not running. Once the corrosion was removed and a good contact was made, things worked as advertised.
So, this weekend I'm going to pull the battery out again and thoroughly clean the posts and connections and treat them with some spray I've got for the car batteries.
Lesson learned. Completely disconnect the battery terminals at least a couple of times a year to check for corrosion between the flat connector and the top of the battery posts.
Actually, I think the problem originally started due to another facet of my lack of smartness. The screws I use for the battery connections are a little short so I took some steel washers and put them under those damned little square nuts that go inside the posts so I could get the screws to engage threads on the nuts. I noted those washers still under the terminal nuts were white with corrosion so think they're the culprit that started all this.
Went to start the KLR this past Monday after it sat for a week and a half or so. Just got a buzzing from the starter relay when I pushed the button.
Put it on the Battery Tender and in about 8 hours it was fully charged again. I thought this was unusual. I should have trusted my instincts, but kind of chalked it up to a battery going bad since mine is 3 years old.
Rode it to work and back (about 60 miles) on Tuesday. No problems.
Rode it to to work today. It fired right up this morning. It sat in the parking lot for 9 hours or so. Started right up when I went to leave. Rode it about 2 miles to another place and it sat there for about an hour and a half.
Came out to start it and nothing: no buzzing from the starter relay; no lights of any kind.
Shit. By now I'm starting to believe maybe there's a problem with the battery. The wife is still in town, so I call her and she drives over there and I try to jump-start it. With the cables connected, bright lights again but nothing but a buzzing from the relay. Leave the cables on for about 15 minutes: no improvement.
By now I'm into full Worst Case Scenario Mode because I can't really leave the thing where it is, and even if we go get the Toyota and ramps, I don't think my wife and I can get it up in the back of it unless it's running and moving under its own power.
I decide to call around town to see if, by any slim chance, anybody has a battery that's at least somewhat charged. So, I pull the battery out so I can read the part number and call about 4 places. One of them carries the battery, but they're all still dry in the box.
I'd looked at the terminals while waiting on the wife and checked to make sure they were tight. I now started looking at them more closely and they seemed to have a slight bit of corrosion: nothing glaring but there was kind of a film on them.
So, before the night really starts to suck, I decide to take a flat-tip screwdriver and scrape the terminals and connectors, then try it again. So, I scratched them up all up with the flat tip and put the battery back in.
Near-disaster when I hooked up the negative cable to the wife's battery and was greeted with sparks and yanked it away real quick as the wife got all excited that we were making progress and yelled, "Hey! It didn't do that before!"
I then realized that I'd gotten flustered and was trying to hook the cable that was attached to the KLR's positive battery terminal to the negative terminal on the Durango. Mucho Stupido, there. I'm probably damned lucky I didn't burn up some wiring or at the least blow a fuse.
Switched the cables back to the proper polarity and tried it again and, voila, the KLR fired right up.
So, in the end, while I like my little pigtail I keep attached to the battery I use to hook up the Battery Tender, not removing the battery on a regular basis led me to neglect the terminals. Just because there's no corrosion on the outside doesn't mean there's not corrosion between the battery post and the connector where you can't see it.
My theory is that the corrosion prevented the KLR's rather anemic charging sytem from getting a good flow of electricity into the battery and it gradually degraded to the point where it didn't have enough oomph to trigger the starter relay. The start when I left work today was probably its last gap and I was doomed when I shut it off at my next destination.
After I charged it with the Tender on Monday, it was okay for awhile, but it caught back up with me again today. There was obviously enough corrosion there that it prevented a good jump-start from the wife's Durango that was not running. Once the corrosion was removed and a good contact was made, things worked as advertised.
So, this weekend I'm going to pull the battery out again and thoroughly clean the posts and connections and treat them with some spray I've got for the car batteries.
Lesson learned. Completely disconnect the battery terminals at least a couple of times a year to check for corrosion between the flat connector and the top of the battery posts.
Actually, I think the problem originally started due to another facet of my lack of smartness. The screws I use for the battery connections are a little short so I took some steel washers and put them under those damned little square nuts that go inside the posts so I could get the screws to engage threads on the nuts. I noted those washers still under the terminal nuts were white with corrosion so think they're the culprit that started all this.