Turning It Over

I sat there at the gas station, having filled my motorcycle up with a tank of clean wonderful premium unleaded. Noting that it now costs as much to fill my Road Glide as it used to for my Expedition. I won't tell you what it now costs to fill the Expedition, that's another rant. Anyway getting back to my sitting on my motorcycle and not going anywhere. I'm not going anywhere because my battery picked that moment to quit. This is the battery in my 2010 Road Glide and barely two years old. Fortunately, I wasn't to far from home and my wonderful wife of 27 years came to the rescue in the before mentioned Expedition and some booster cables.

I was astonished at how short a life that stock battery gave and even more astonished to find that it wasn't covered under any kind of warranty and please note this isn't a case of neglect. My bike is my transportation to from work on all non-rainy days which here in Texas is most of them. Anyway, I went to my local dealer and found that not only did they want to put in the same kind of basic lead acid battery that failed the first time but they wanted my first born to pay for it. That didn't seem right, so I started to do some research and found that there were good alternatives and that they were actually made here in the U.S.

The price for one of these high performance maintenance free batteries was several percentage points less than the best deal I would have gotten for a stock battery making this a no-brainer. I've been running it now for eight or so months and found that it cranks the bike over better than the stock battery ever did meaning faster starts and hopefully less wear on the starter.

I've also started to pay a lot more attention to the analog voltage meter on the bike and realizing that the stock gauge on the bike doesn't tell me a whole lot. Just resting a fully charged battery should read somewhere around 12.75 to 12.9 volts. My gauge on the Road Glide reads just over 11 when I first turn it on basically because of the draw from the headlight and electronics and then goes to something over 13 when it's running. You notice my choice of adjectives right, 'around', 'just over', 'close to' etc etc. That's because that's what an analogue gauge give you, basically a guesstimate. I know my battery is good because I've learned to check it with a digital volt meter when I'm doing my regular maintenance. The stock gauge wasn't and isn't much help. The original battery basically gave the same readings that this one does but if I had been paying a wee bit more attention I could have saved myself some embarrassment (and a lot of time). So I've learned that along with tire pressure, belt tension, oil levels I need to add battery voltage check.