• 4 Stroke Husqvarna Motorcycles Made In Italy - About 1989 to 2014
     TE = 4st Enduro & TC = 4st Cross

  • Hi everyone,

    As you all know, Coffee (Dean) passed away a couple of years ago. I am Dean's ex-wife's husband and happen to have spent my career in tech. Over the years, I occasionally helped Dean with various tech issues.

    When he passed, I worked with his kids to gather the necessary credentials to keep this site running. Since then (and for however long they worked with Coffee), Woodschick and Dirtdame have been maintaining the site and covering the costs. Without their hard work and financial support, CafeHusky would have been lost.

    Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working to migrate the site to a free cloud compute instance so that Woodschick and Dirtdame no longer have to fund it. At the same time, I’ve updated the site to a current version of XenForo (the discussion software it runs on). The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.

    Unfortunately, the new software version doesn’t support importing the old site’s styles, so for now, you’ll see the XenForo default style. This may change over time.

    Coffee didn’t document the work he did on the site, so I’ve been digging through the old setup to understand how everything was running. There may still be things I’ve missed. One known issue is that email functionality is not yet working on the new site, but I hope to resolve this over time.

    Thanks for your patience and support!

Starting problems

If you are hearing several clicks from the starter relay then you likely have a bad or discharged battery, or a bad battery connection. The motor requires much more power to turn over tha that relay does. Low voltage will cause the relay coil to chatter. You need to measure the battery voltage and if that is OK, measure it on teh starter side of the relay. You can trace where the problem is easily this way. Even a 12V light bulb with some wires work. Do you have an old turn signal laying around?. Voltmeters are really inexpensive at Harbor Frieght or any auto parts store. They are key to solving these kinds of problems.

Check your battery cables are tight.

You asked about using a car battery. If you are not absolutely confident about what you are hooking up I would avoid it. There is a load of power in a car battery and a slip or wrong connection can result in a really big spark or you welding your frame or melting your wires since you probably won't have put a fuse in line.

If you use a car battery, use jumper cables to your bike battery only, no where else. Rather than do this, I would first measure your battery voltage, or take it someplace that can. When you do get your bike started, make sure the battery voltage rises to 14.5VDC indicating the charging circuit is working OK.

A Voltmeter is a great investment.
 
After stripping the bike pretty far down, and checking many connectors with my digital multimeter, spraying them with contact cleaner, and general fretting, I decided to remove the starter, and set it on a stool. After applying 12 VDC to it, it did not work. I was really puzzled, until I flipped the switch on my car battery charger to 50 Amp. boost. Then it spun so hard it danced on the stool! I realized the problem was not so much about battery voltage, but CCA, Cold Charging Amps. Normally my charger is set to 12 VDC, 2 A. or 10 A. Sitting off the bike, the starter needs around 20 Amp. to spin. To over come engine friction, and ADC delay, maybe 50 Amp. is needed.

The Chinese Yuasa battery clone I bought six months ago was not putting out enough CCA even though it measured 12.5V. What a POS! Now I'm in a mad rush to get a genuine Yuasa YTZ7S before Saturday's ride. The Yuasa is advertised to put out 130 CCA. Any stocking sources for this battery appreciated.

My thanks to all that offered suggestions. Whew.
 
A battery can show full voltage without a load, and go to a fraction of the nominal voltage as soon as you try to draw a lot of current. I assumed at the time that a bright head-light indicated a good battery. I learned that that is just not true. The head-light draws a lot less current than the starter, so a marginal battery can light up the lights just fine, but fall on it's face when called on to crank the starter.
Click to expand...

This was the problem. Even though the battery was fully charged, it was not putting out enough CCAs.
 
The problem with old batteries is that the internal resistance goes up due to corrosion of the plates. It's like putting a big resistor in between the battery and the starter. As long as the current draw is low, the voltage drop across the resistance is also low. As the current flow (measured in amps) increases so does the drop in voltage. The net result is that the starter load (measured in ohms - AKA resistance) becomes less as the internal battery resistance goes up, and the voltage drop moves from the starter (where it's supposed to happen) to the battery itself. Low voltage drop in the starter means low torque output.

Any high resistance (old battery, corroded connections, broken strands in the cables, etc) in the circuit will do exact same thing.

So, what you saw with the charger was the same thing. The current limited mode in your charger is achieved by putting a variable internal resistance in the charger. It works by limiting the voltage drop across the load (the battery in this case) by changing the internal resistance of the charger to whatever will flow no more than the specified current.

I think of the flow of DC electricity as working the same as the flow of water in a pipe or hose. As you close a faucet you increase the resistance to the flow. The pressure drop across the faucet goes up leaving the high pressure (voltage) on the up-stream side of the faucet. If you put another faucet in the same pipe the pressure drop is split between the two restrictions. Changing one affects the other one. For the same reason a small pipe will flow a small amount of water just fine. Increase the flow and eventually the speed of the water causes friction and resistance to the flow. Pressure is lost at the down stream end. So, big flow needs a big pipe. Same thing for electricity. Big current (starter for instance) needs a big cable.
 
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