CHARGE!

As I posted in a comment on Riding Out the Recession, the news from the shop is that the regulator/rectifier, which I replaced in August, is working, but not kicking out as much voltage as you'd expect. It should still be charging the battery, though. The battery, on the other hand, is toast. Out of acid. Dead-ski. Kaput. It could just have been a bad battery.

But how would a 10-month old battery be shot? Did it get boiled by too much charge from the R/R? It could be a bad R/R, and/or possibly a bad stator powering the R/R, and/or, well, who knows? Anyone want to put money on the wiring harness?

Paul, our local mechanic at Santa Fe Motorsports -- a guy who had plenty of legit reasons to pass this job up, but took it anyway -- suggested that with a new battery and a trickle charger that we'll use when in proximity of an outlet, this little dead battery won't be the reason R2 doesn't make it to Alaska. Not saying anything about the other possible reasons, of course.

In particular, I'll be curious whether a deeper root cause of R2's various electrical anomalies is revealed. (The brake-light switch for my front brake, which had mysteriously had stopped working near Vail, also started working again yesterday morning.)

In any case, thanks to Paul's help, we hope to be back on the road to Flagstaff this morning. It might seem strange to be excited to be back on the road without complete confidence that we've gotten to the bottom of things, but since they don't present safety issues while riding (just inconvenience and expense), I'm inclined to just keep an eye on it for a while. Well, that, and have a map of the nearest motorcycle shops to our path! ;)