It’s that sinking feeling you get when you haven’t been on the motorbike for a week or two, and you pull the cover off, turn the key, watch the rev needle pulse across, then hit the ignition button to hear a whelp and that empty clicking which tells me that this battery is not holding charge how it used to.
Actually, I’ve known for a while this day was coming, partly because when I put it on the Optimate at the end of December it didn’t give it a great rating, and partly because it’s now four and a half years old.
What to do? Well, what to do is to push the bike a hundred metres on the flat to the top of the hill near where we live, sit on it, trying to appear like just a normal, average biker, then start rolling the bike down that hill, let it get some momentum up and then drop that thing into second gear and hear it roar!
Perhaps not roar, but turn over for sure. At the very least.
This never fails – except for that one time when it did fail, when I’d had the previous battery, when I’d left it for far too long before replacing it, that roar moment never arrived, and I had to push the bike back up the hill to our house, where I then sat grumpily drinking tea for an hour wishing I was out on the road. Good exercise for sure, but not actually fun, per se.
The other times when it does work, you can then ride off and enjoy yourself and blissfully forget about that battery issue until after the next non-ignition, and another rolling start.
Not this time! No pushing motorbikes uphill again, I would actually do something about in a matter of days, not weeks this time.
I went off to NAPS to see what a new battery was going to set me back. NAPS is a motorbike superstore of sorts, selling clothing to tyres to mods and doing general maintenance works.
I’d done my homework of course – Amazon Japan had the battery model I needed for 10,500yen, but would take a week to ten days to be delivered, but I like buying local, and according to the NAPS website, I should come into their shop to check out the deals on batteries!
Indeed, deals there were. As long as you wanted Furukawa batteries. There were great deals on many Furukawa batteries. The only problem was that I didn’t want a Furukawa battery – they do make great batteries, they really do, but they’re expensive, and even with a 30% discount they were 20,000yen for my bike, when what I wanted was more of what I had – a basic GS Yuasa unit. Alas, GS Yuasa were not included in the great battery sale really, meaning my battery would cost me a little over 15,000yen. I don’t believe in using shops as a showroom and then buying online, but – it’s a battery, there’s an identical one in my bike already, and sadly 30% is a bit more than I’d usually pay for buying local.
Given the notes on Amazon, I expected to have to wait for a week at least. The battery actually arrived two days later. That’s pretty good service to be fair.
All that remained to do was pull the old one out, and put this new one in. On my model of bike it’s really simple – take the seat off, remove one screw, pull a flap down, then remove the battery and put the new one in. It’s as easy as that – literally a five minute job, depending on tea requirements and neighbours asking what you’re doing.
The moral of this story then is to perform regular battery maintenance (the Optimate has always been good it seems), and to buy a new battery when you need to. And yes, my bike is over a decade old and has this thing called a ‘carburetor’, having a flat battery with more modern injection systems can be more complicated.
I actually felt a little let down by NAPS. Their website, by not giving me a price on the GS Yuasa item, and recommending to go to the shop was a little false as there was no sale on that item. That said, this is business, and it’s always nice to browse in NAPS, and I did remember to pick up some chain cleaner I needed anyway. You got me.