Bringing a dead lead acid battery back to life?

Convinced one of my Guzzisti mates to try a SSB Lithium as he works overseas and was only home every 2 or 3 months and his lead acid battery was always flat. No such problems with the Lithium, always ready to go (and weighs 1/10 as much)
 
I have revived a lot of wet lead-acid batteries. Just desulphating them, no use of Epsom salt. If they have some other defect, like a mechanical defect, then the battery is gone in most of cases. Other case is when the plates are gone, then they are gone. Laverdas tend to make mechanical defects to batteries, because of plenty of vibrations.

Some batteries have lasted almost 20 years (15 at least) in use with my methods, but this is actually quite rare.
Yes, they are batteries for vehicles which has electrical starter motors.

My methods are from a guy, who collected the methods in 1960's and 1970's from the "old engineers."

The method is somewhat the following for sulphated wet lead-acid batteries:
-Charge and dicharge them a lot of times. Small amperage is recommended (slow charger, CTEK or similar may not work).
A suitable load for discharging is bulb say around 60 Watts, H4 for instance, for car batteries, and a bulb around 20 Watts for motorcycle batteries. The voltage should not go under 8 Volts when the discharging is stopped. I have also made a device that stops discharging at 8 Volts.

If this is not enough, you can try one or more of the following methods:
-If the battery don't start to get any charging current, boil them charging with high currents (fast charger), this push sulphate out from the plates.
-One method is to over discharge them even to 0V and then add a shortcut for a while. This can, but mostly doesn't break them.
-One method is to discharge them with high amperages.

Method for very sulphated battery:
-Empty every fluid from cells. Try to empty them that way all the dirt will come out of them.
-Add plain battery water, no acid.
-Charge the battery for hours, the current will be very small, because there is too less acid on it.
This will take the sulphated acid out from plates to water. C-TEK doesn't work on this one.
-Do the first three stages so many times that the plates look good, every second look caffee brown and every second
light grey.
(At this point the battery can be storaged for long period, because there is only very small amount of acid on them. It should not freeze because there is almost plain water on it.)
-Then empty every fluid again.
-Fill them with battery water and acid that way the density will be good. This is quite hard,
the amount of added acid should be a littlebit less than for a new battery and cannot
be known accurately, just trial and error method.
-Then charge and check levels and densities.
-Charging and discharging some times again should equal the densities between the cells.
A little bit acid can be added to some cell that has too little acid.

This needs a lot of time and battery water. I got sometimes battery water for free from a power plant.

Use at your own risk! If the battery doesn't start to work, then it was gone anyway. These have been worked
in quite good manner if the batteries are not too old (say over 10 years) and just sulphated.
 
OK, you've got eight bikes so are not short of cash.  Get a C-TEK or similar battery tender for each one and have each bike ready to go at a moments notice.  Although why the fuck you'd want to go out on that Hardly Able-to I don't know.

In fact, better idea, sell the Harley, buy seven chargers and with what's left have a nice holiday in the Caribbean when winter really sets in. :D
 
I think best thing to keep batteries working is to discharge every vehicle battery to 8 Volt and then recharge it every year. No difference is the battery in use or not, but of course this is even more important for batterys not in use.
 
Reggie3cl said:
OK, you've got eight bikes so are not short of cash.  Get a C-TEK or similar battery tender for each one and have each bike ready to go at a moments notice.  Although why the fuck you'd want to go out on that Hardly Able-to I don't know.

In fact, better idea, sell the Harley, buy seven chargers and with what's left have a nice holiday in the Caribbean when winter really sets in. :D
Click to expand...

Hi Reggie

as the riding season is just ending here ( has snowed heavily already but then thankfully melted) and it is presently minus 2 outside, I am beginning the process of winterization for seasonal storage. I already have 4 of the C-Tek chargers, plus a large fancy high tech reconditioning charger, and I will add charging hookups to the last couple of bikes. I have been waiting for the C-Tek chargers to go on sale, the local speed shop typically puts them on sale for about 40 per cent off just before Christmas every year, then I will buy a couple more.

For the Harley, as I could not find a Laverda triple to buy for this winters project, the Harley is this winters project, it is on the lift and coming apart gradually, the bloody thing is way more complicated than a Laverda triple in a number of ways, especially the electrical accessories, cruise control, intercom, CB radio, stereo and amplifiers, passenger intercom and stereo controls, and so on. The radio control unit is being shipped back to the manufacturer to be refurbished, and so on. I have ordered most of the mechanical bits and bobs to rebuild front suspension, all the brakes, drive belt, etc., etc. Once it is done I will put it back into service as a regular rider, I really like the bike, no accounting for varied tastes, I guess.....

MotoJouni

I admire your persistence in reviving dead batteries, and it sounds like the process has a reasonable success rate for you. My own one time experiment failed as the plates in two of the six cells in the battery failed when I was "boiling" the battery at a high charge rate. I did manage to recover four of the six cells, and now have a perfectly serviceable 8 volt battery.  ;)  I do have to admit that playing around with the battery acid made me nervous, I am going to try to stick now to making sure the various batteries do not get a chance to go dead in the first place. Thanks very much for the information, I may give it a try again at some point.

Paul LeClair
 
I have been thinking about this multiple bike, multiple battery, dead battery, maintain batteries, buy more chargers, tripping over extension cords thing.  Any way you look at it, it is a pain in the ass and expensive to keep multiple batteries going. I can only ride one bike at a time, and the way insurance works here I only keep one registered at a time, so I would have one on the road for a month or so then switch to the other bike. They are stored in the off season, which is 6 months in the frozen north of Canada. In the winter I only ride one snowmobile at a time. With the advent of the lithium batteries maybe the answer is to take advantage of their small size and have one battery to move between the fleet to the current ride. I have not used lithium batteries yet so have no first hand experience. I know there are varying opinions on the forum on the lithium batteries, including specific experiences with our Laverdas and the type of charger needed. With the physical size of the lithium batteries being so small,  you get high cranking power in small package which makes them easy to get in and out of the Laverda (the most awkward battery location off all my vehicles) and enough power for any bike or snowmobile,  one battery should be good for all the vehicles. Next time I need  new battery for one of the motor toys I am going to look into this option. 
 
I tend to use Odyssey PC680s on my triples and they go for up to 6 months without topping up and the bike spins up ok.
 
Yup the Odyssey  in my Jota performs as Grant describes..think it is even a smaller one.of my 3 bikes the Jota gives the least electrical and battery problems, BMW included!
 
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