Spoke with Switzer Motors, and they said you cannot use a bigger battery to boost the Vector 250 or you will damage the Stator. the stock battery is 9AH, and they said don't even use a 10AH battery! Well, this comes as a big surprise. The Vector has no kickstart to use as a backup, so if your battery is down you are supposed to tow it home and wait until you charge up the battery?

 

I've been sick the lat several days, hence the delay in responding to this.

You can put in any 12 volt lead acid battery you want as long as it fits mechanically. The stator doesn't know nor care what kind of battery is out there. It doen't even know if there is a battery at all.

Stators are inherently self limiting in output current and output power. You can't burn them up by overloading them. They just go into current limit. In fact many voltage regulators work by shorting out the stator charge winding when the battery charging voltage gets high enough.

You can see why someone inexperienced may make some wrong assumptions. You can't short out your house wiring. It is not current limited at all (until the breaker pops anyway), and if the circuit breakers weren't there you would melt wires and start a fire.

But this electrical model does not apply at all to stators. They work by spinning magnets past coils of wire. This generates AC voltage proportional to engine speed. But when you load the stator and draw current, those same coils generate their own magnetic field which opposes the fields in the spinning magnets. At higher loads the counter magnetic fields from the coils equals the field strength of the spinning magnets. There is no more magnetic field lines from the spinning magnets cutting through the coils, and no more output power generated. It simply runs out of steam.

 

Thanks, LynnEdwards, I do hope you are feeling better. I, too found the advice from Switzer Motors a bit strange, and I did in fact but a new 10AH battery, assuming that the one extra amp-hour would not kill the AVT (which is rated for a 9AH battery). Haven't had a chance to try it out just yet, but will post again when I do.

 

The problem is solved. I got a brand new (expensive) battery from Canadian Tire, CHARGED IT PROPERLY, and put it in. The ATV worked fine.

I also happened to read up on batteries, and how easy it is to wreck them when charging them for the first time. (E.G., a lot of dealers charge them up quickly, which is a big mistake, and I also learned to my surprise that you cannot charge them with too little current, either (like .9 amps or less), but rather you should use an intelligent charger that puts out 1-3 amps, and THEN use a small device like Battery Tender to maintain the charge in the future (when, e.g., you leave the bike for 2-3 months or more).

Anyway, the problem was I was killing my batteries, and now I'm not. All's well that ends well!

And thanks again for all the help, LynnEdwards!

 

Hey, i have an eton challenger 150 with a problem.
The sparkplug wont ignite, but when im running the starter and pulling the killer switch OFF, i get 1 ignite. Any idea?