So I've let my motorcycles sit for probably somewhere around a year at this point? Maybe more? Time is an illusion. Needless to say it's been a hot minute since I put some miles on any of them, and while they've handled their unscheduled nap quite well, for the most part, it has taken its toll here and there.
This is the battery from Gregg, my CB650F. It was measuring 3 volts before I put it on the charger for 24 hours. Now it's up to 7.3v. This is a great voltage reading for a 6 volt battery, it's just a shame that it's supposed to be a 12 volt battery.
Anyway, this is the original battery that Honda shoved into this bike back in 2018, so it's high time for replacing it with something newer, and what better opportunity to also upgrade to something more modern?
This LiFePO4 replacement is much lighter than the original sealed lead acid, and as a bonus to that upgraded chemistry you can actually pack the same performance into a much smaller package. In fact, previous LiFePO4 batteries I've installed have been comically small compared to the OE battery they replaced, and simply came with some self-adhesive foam blocks for you to stick onto the sides to pad it out to fit into the original space of the lead acid it was replacing.
Thankfully the product design has come a long way since then, and now we get a battery that's actually sized to fill the appropriate amount of space (even though it's mostly air inside) plus a stack of injection-molded spacers that adapt it to a variety of different standard SLA sizes.
Of course I don't actually need any of those spacers for my bike, so they ended up just going straight into the recycle bin, but I suppose it helps cut down on SKUs.
Anyway, on with the show.
The CB650F has a pretty classic layout with the battery under the seat.
The old battery was already removed, so it's just a matter of dropping the new one into place and strapping it down.
Unfortunately this is where the first slight wrinkle comes in: the connectors on this bike are designed specifically for the 3-way terminal blocks on SLA batteries, and the manufacturer of this LiFePO4 battery decided to get a little creative and move the screw inboard a little ways, meaning that this tab on the edge of the connector which would usually hang over the edge of the terminal now prevents the connector from sitting flush.
But it's easy enough to just flatten that out.
Since the negative connector comes in from a different angle, the tab isn't an issue there, and so connecting things up from here is a snap.
With the battery just sitting there and the bike powered on but not running we see a very healthy voltage.
And everything looks good with the bike idling as well.
So now it's all ready to ride.
Thankfully I didn't have to discover this right before I was about to go out on a ride, which would have spoiled my fun. I actually noticed it when I was changing the oil, for the first time in about 4 years. That might sound neglectful, but I'd only put about 450 miles on the bike in that time, so really it was more like a premature waste of oil.
Ah well, oil is cheap and it's better to be safe than sorry, and I at least put more miles on this bike than on Scooty-Puff, my BMW C600; whose oil I changed at the same time (Rabbit Season and Orthrus are going to have to wait for next week because I ran out of oil recycling containers).
Speaking of Scooty-Puff, it does have a LiFePO4 battery in it already, and despite sitting for just as long, it not only still had a charge left in it, but in fact had enough charge to easily start the bike right up.
Colour me impressed.
No comments:
Post a Comment