Electrical Issues Theory (frankenbike)

Providing all terminals are clean & tight, the wires are big enough to carry the load that set up should be fine.

There are parts of the system that get power 24/7 weather that is at the battery or a few inches away it should not be a issue.

quote; "Since I'm going through stators " I take it that is your problem ?

Is it a 650 or 1000 and what year model ?

What regulator are you using ?

A shunt reg can shorten the life of a stator.

It gets even worse if you reduce the electrical load by reducing the number of headlights and or going to LED globes

Is the reg getting cooled by good air flow ?

Is the battery good ? if it is on the edge replace it.

These are the first things that come to my mind.

Thanks for responding.


Is it a 650 or 1000 and what year model ? ^^^^^^^ It's a k5 SV1000s motor with a modified k2 DL1000 wire harness. looking at the "playing with wires" link above would shed some light. The page linked can lead to a complete documentation of the build that occurred in 2007.

What regulator are you using ?^^^^^^^^^ It's a shunt. Pulled last one(although still tested good) which was OEM after 20k on oem Stator. Now have Rick's (shunt) tests good. Looking at Mosfets (SH847) but would like to rule other things out first.

It gets even worse if you reduce the electrical load by reducing the number of headlights and or going to LED globes ^^^^^^^^ Using LED's all around.

Is the reg getting cooled by good air flow ?^^^^^^^^^^ Not really. In stock location.

..What do you suppose the possibility is of a sharp bump being able to lift a single magnet enough to contact and short a single node of the stator. All my failures are on a single node of stator. When jbwelding between my magnets I was hesitant to try to lift to test glue because none had yet migrated. Was that a big mistake? My thought was that the centrifugal force of the rotor spinning would prevent any lift. I just had a rewound oem core with 10x the insulation fail in 5k miles. . Thanks.





Is the battery good ? if it is on the edge replace it. ^^^^^^^^18 month old Yuasa.

NEW DEVELOPMENT: charging now operates normally cold start up to operating temp then malfunctions. Cold start voltage up to 14.2 (best I've seen at voltmeter. 14.3 at battery) consistent at idle. Once fully warmed up charge voltage drops to 13.6v at 3500+ rpm. Drops to 12.5 at idle. Same as last 2 times. ONE BAD (burned) node on stator both times.

I went through a bunch of pain with the charging system on my old 2007 DL1000 before I got it reliable. I'll save you the trouble of digging for all the old posts though.

The short of it is that a series R/R (SH847) did not by itself get stators to stop burning up. I only had a completely trouble-free charging system (for the next 30k miles until a jackass crashed it out from under me, at least) once I stopped throwing factory Suzuki stators at it, & had the stator rebuilt by Custom Rewind, as well as installing the SH847.

I didn't try Custom Rewind before the SH847 because I didn't know about them at the time. Wonder what my results would have been?

All this to say, I'm not sure what the actual answer is. You already had the Custom Rewind-rebuilt stator, and I would have expected that to be the solution.

If you like, I can get into my old maintenance notes and work out a sequence of events. How many miles and months such and such component lasted etc.

I suspected but could not prove that the OEM R/R had something to do with the stators burning up. Certainly the original one (stator} did, it was burned enough not to keep the battery charged by 22k miles, not long after I bought the bike (used).

I recall doing voltage tests with a new factory stator on the OEM R/R and finding everything shipshape. You'd think it must have been malfunctioning somehow to cause stators to burn up.

It really has little to do with whether the regulator works or not it is the way they work.

A shunt reg dumps any excess power back to ground through the stator.

It basically causes a dead short many times a second, if you have ever shorted a battery you will have seen the sparks and the heat generated, that is what your sunt reg is doing over & over again.

With LED lights you will be dumping more back to ground than the system was designed for. (do you still have 2 headlights )

My wee is on the original stator & reg and I believe two things have made that possible, all original lights and running a high oil level to help cool the stator.

Centrifugal forces should make it impossible for them to move inwards, the JB is there to stop them clumping together not to hold them on, it was not a mistake to leave the magnets in place, no glue is required under them.

Was there any signs someone else tried to fix the magnets before you ?

The polarity must be right for them to work, if any were spun around the system will not work as it should.

Another magnet can be used to test the polarity of the magnets.


Is the rotor original to the bike or is it from another bike ?

Is it fixed in place & unable to slip. ?

How many magnets do you have ?

Is the stator fail point near the top ? that would point to a heat problem.

Get the bike up to temperature and to a point where the voltage starts to drop off then test the AC output at each stator wire.

Load test the battery, age has nothing to do with the performance.

Sorry I don't have time to read through all the information in your link, if I find time I will have a look.

Was there any signs someone else tried to fix the magnets before you ?^^^^^no signs but unknown

The polarity must be right for them to work, if any were spun around the system will not work as it should.

Another magnet can be used to test the polarity of the magnets.^^^^^^^^^will do


Is the rotor original to the bike or is it from another bike ?^^^^^^^Unknown

Is it fixed in place & unable to slip. ? ^^^^^^^I'll double check when My rewind arrives.

How many magnets do you have ?^^^^^^^new style...6 I believe

Is the stator fail point near the top ? that would point to a heat problem.^^^^^^^IIRC the wires connected to stator are at 12 o'clock...burnt node is at 6 o'clock (on the one I have in hand)

Get the bike up to temperature and to a point where the voltage starts to drop off then test the AC output at each stator wire.^^^^^^^^^^willdo

Load test the battery, age has nothing to do with the performance. ^^^^^^^will do

Sorry I don't have time to read through all the information in your link, if I find time I will have a look.^^^^^^^^no worries....the whole thing is a tome.


thanks for responding

No it isn't. It can't and doesn't work like that.

A shunt regulator rectifier regulates voltage by means of a voltage divider. Details differ, but the basic principle is simple. Voltage in excess of the target amount diverts through a parallel load - that's the "shunt" in the name. It's burned off as heat, essentially. That load is explicitly not the stator, it is a resistance within the R/R. The R/R has those massive heat fins in part to let it cool off from passing excess power through that parallel resistance.

Do that too much and yes, you might cook your R/R, either quick or over time. I never had a solid indication that my factory R/R was dying. It was the stator that seemed to be the weak point. Insufficient insulation, probably. When I had my stator rebuilt by Custom Rewind, it had a bunch more insulation on it, and that seemed to do the trick. Not sure what's going on in OP's case.

There isn't a way for the R/R to feed power back through the stator. For at least 2 reasons:

1) it's not wired that way. There's no path for current to flow back through the stator. That's the "rectifier" part of "regulator-rectifier."

2) even if it tried to do so, the R/R would be fighting the AC voltage coming out of the stator.

The DL1000 stator generates around 90-100V AC (maybe as high as 125V?) with a minimum spec of 75V AC. For half of the cycle, it would be physically impossible for the regulator to push power into the stator.

You can't push current, only draw it, and current won't be going the way you want if you have a 75V potential (around 53V RMS) opposing your 14.5V potential.

Even a bizarre, one in a million R/R malfunction would be unlikely to somehow make current backflow through the stator. Something should catch on fire or blow a fuse, or stop providing power, first.




Here is a schematic of the early DL1000 charging system, straight from the service manual.

Notice the arrow looking things on the wires coming from the stators. Diodes. They only let current flow one way.

There is also a silicon current rectifier (SCR), with its exact location somewhat vague.

Don't know what kind of SCR Suzuki used. It may in fact be throwing away half the cycle, or it may be more efficient than that.

(It probably does throw away a lot of power. Most sources say SCRs are fairly inefficient.)

SCR's are another rabbit hole one can go down, but it's not needed for the present discussion.

With a series reg the reg will get hot, with a shunt reg the stator will get hot, it has been proven over and over again.

The fix for excess power is a series reg because of the way it divides the unwanted power.

If a shunt reg is so good at its job know body would ever upgrade * a series reg is a upgrade and is advisable if you reduce the power load.

A shunt voltage regulator operates by providing a path from the supply voltage to the ground through a variable resistance. From the load, current is shunted away from the load to the ground. Shunt regulators are widely used because they are cheap, effective and simple

The series voltage regulator also referred to as the series pass regulator and is the most preferred approach for providing the final voltage regulation in a linear regulated power supply and is able to provide high level of performance, especially when low noise, ripple and transients are required in the regulated output. Depending on the design, it may be used to regulate one or more AC or DC voltages.

Latest: Pulled stator after testing bad...No Load was 30,50,100+ . spec is [email protected] .4, .5, .02 spec.4-.7. Hard to tell what malfunctioned on stator due to thick opaque insulation from Custom Rewind. Photos are of 2 oem stators one with less insulation(not rewound) from before 1 bad node.





Ricks R/R tested bad on 1 leg. Had to make a decision about how to proceed weighing expense on this high (unknown) mileage bike. SH847 Series may or may not be solution $253 +tax shipping, non returnable, no warranty. Mosfet @$175 .unknown warranty. I elected to go with electrosport shunt $114 ,1 year warranty. Stator went back to custom rewind for warranty re do. Oem gasket ordered to a dealership an hours drive away for $22. Probably just need to brace myself for doing this every year. Deciding to not go with sh847 is probably going to bite me.

HOW DO YOU CHECK ROTOR MAGNETS FOR CORRECT ORIENTATION OF POLARITY?