Electrosport Stator Failure

My pickup coil and stator replacement that I did a while back did not go so well in the long term.  The bike worked great for 7 to 8 months and then started having problems with the battery holding a charge. If I rode in the rain for more than 10 to 15 minutes the battery would drain and become dead as a doornail and the engine would die leaving me on the side of the road in the rain and having to push start it after the rain stopped.   Several of these battery drain events occurring were enough to kill a battery.

Since the battery mostly only drained completely in wet conditions and otherwise started up and ran fine it took me a very long time to diagnose the problem.  I assumed I had a short that occurred in wet conditions and cut apart and went through the entire wiring harness more than once.  I cleaned every connection and switch with electrical cleaner and then treated every connection with dielectric grease when that didn’t work.   I did attach a digital voltage meter to the bars and noticed it was running a bit low at 12.4V at speed but not all _that_ bad and attributed it to my phantom short.

I had just changed the stator and assumed it had to be anything but that. I did check the ohms across all 3 coils just to be sure and all read in spec. After months of frustration and pulling my hair out and going through 3 dead batteries that weren’t cheap I gave up, admitted defeat and thought about trading in my bike on something else.

A tip from a friend to try before I did anything rash was to check the AC voltage straight from the stator since I had done everything else.  With nothing to loose I ran the bike off a fully charged battery and the fuel line stuck down in a small cup of gas and plugged the multimeter (on AC Voltage) test probes into the 3 wire connector from the stator in every combination.  What I found:  28V 28V and 2V !!!   Eureka!  I was only running on 2/3 of my stator.  No freaking wonder I was having problems!

FINALLY I knew what was wrong, I cracked the bike open and this was what I found. Crispy!    Sure enough the stator was toast and one of the coils was burned up completely.

With 2 out of 3 coils of the stator functioning and putting out 12.4V it was enough to barely keep the bike running but any extra draw such as the carb heaters kicking on in cooler weather like rainy conditions it would drain the battery very quickly.  This kept sending me down the wrong path for troubleshooting and took forever to figure out.

As I mentioned in my earlier writeup I had heard of enough Electrosport stator failures that it had made me nervous enough to purchase an Accel unit to have as a spare on hand.   On the various V Star forums several theories had been put forth as to why there were so many accounts of  failures of the Electrosport stators. Is it because these stators have a higher output and thus generate more heat?  or because there are simply more of them sold than other aftermarket options and thus it seems like there is a higher rate of failure?  I don’t know.

I do know that while I had mine installed I did not have any extra electrical draws from stock and in fact with several LED light conversions my bike should have had significantly less draw than stock and still the stator fried in less than 8000 miles and one season of riding.

 

I suppose it is good that I had purchased this Accel stator and pickup coil a year ago because they seem to be a lot harder to come by now.

 

I replaced my fried Electrosport stator with this one using the same steps as my previous writeup.

 

One benefit of having to crack open the crankcase for a second time is that I can now confirm that my extra steps done to seal every wire going through the stator grommets succeeded beautifully and there is absolutely no chance of a leak in this location when done this way.    Here you can see bare metal between the grommets and not a single drop of oil.

 

 

All the RTV on these grommets made getting them off and cleaning up the crankcase cover for doing all of this a second time a bear and very time consuming but well worth it for no leaks.

 

Since these stator failures aren’t exactly a repair you can do on the side of the road without an extra part and now after having to do this twice I’m now contemplating getting ANOTHER spare to have just in case. My first failure was pickup coil related, the second was the stator.  Sadly Accel stators are now hard to find but with the pickup coil still being good on the Electrosport unit I may send the whole thing to Rick’s to get the stator part rewound.

This way if we do have a failure while on the road I can have someone back home find the part on the shelf and ship it over night to us and we can get back under way.