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Friday, Oct 5 2018 [41,791 miles]

I’m about 200 miles short of 42K. It’s also been just over a year since the 36K service. I didn’t ride the bike nearly as much as usual this year. Probably because I’m riding my DR650 more often than not.

The bike is over 5 years old. I’m still running the OEM battery. It even has a sticker with the bike’s VIN. Time for a change. I ordered an Anti-gravity LoFePO4 battery that will fit the bike. That also means I ordered a LiFePO4 compatible charger, too. The instructions for the battery were pretty specific about not using lead-acid “smart” chargers. I expect to use another LiFePO4 battery in my DR. A proper charger will be a good tool to have.

This is the new battery. The case has positive and negative terminals on both front and pack. Pick the ones you want to use. I matched the terminal locations used on the stock battery.

Unhook ground. Unhook the rubber retaining strap and bracket. Notice the spacer under the battery. Slide the battery out to get access to the hot lead.

The new battery is in a standard size case. It is, however, larger than the battery that came with the bike. BMW used a spacer to make the stock battery better fit in the bike. The spacer probably helped damp vibrations, too.

The battery fit without a spacer. There was room to spare. I liked the idea of some vibration damping, though. I cut the stock spacer into two pieces and put the smaller piece under the battery. I think that is better.

The last thing done today was hooking up my GS-911 and do an autoscan to check for fault codes. But before that my GS-911 needed updating. To update I clicked on a couple of buttons then waited 10-15 minutes for code to be downloaded, unpacked, installed, etc.

The autoscan reported one error – a bulb failure. Yup. I replaced a headlight about 3 weeks ago.

More tomorrow.

 

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