Triumphrat

jschenoweth

Forchetto,

I am going to change seats on my T100 in the next day or so. I will look to see what battery the dealer installed and post back up here.

I really appreciate your insight. It's great to see your posts all throughout these forums.

I was surprised to see so many other with these same starting issues. Ugh...

Forchetto

It's only a guess and I hope the dealer has made an honest mistake. It's easily done, the batteries are usually stored on a separate shelf somewhere in the workshop and often they get a junior boy to do some of the pre-delivery work. The wrong battery can be easily fitted and often the commissioning procedure recommended by battery makers is ignored as well, making sure the battery will fail earlier and not deliver its full voltage throughout its life.

A further clue as to what battery should be fitted is the location of the cables. On the later, larger battery layouts, the cables come from the side of the battery (see previous photo), whereas on the earlier layout with the smaller one they come from the direction of the tank, as it were:

This is an earlier model:

HacksawsGarage

so one needs the bigger battery, AIS removed, and the aftermarket headlite module.
cool!

strangely, my dealer told me NOT to ever use the choke. i have been lately.

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HacksawsGarage

LWRider

Me, too! 2011 T100. Intermittent start failures exactly as described. On the other hand since March I have put on over 10,000 miles, in botjh freezing and hot temps and not once did my Bonnie fail to run after an initial start failure. I mentioned this to the tech at my dealer and suggested it might have to do with the motor being stopped at a point of high compression, requiring more oomph to spin it and that once it makes that first faltering attempt it is at another place in the cycle and spins up. He nodded in agreement, for what it's worth.

Cheers,

Mike

markburton68

I had the same problem with my 2010 bonnie.
Then i read the hand book about using the choke at every start,Hasnt happend agian i did feel a bit silly not reading the manual first.Wont do that again.

Forchetto

As you can read on HacksawsGarage post a little earlier, post 103, even dealers ignore the starting procedures as laid out in the handbook. A huge percentage of the starting problems people are having are due to this.

If you live in a temperate area where the temperatures don't drop much you can get away with it, but as temperatures drop it becomes progressively more important to stick to the recommendations.

Bob D.

FWIW, I don't feel that way at all. I love my bike and at this point consider this "strange starting issue" more a minor curiosity than a problem. I posted previously in this thread because I had an instance of this issue and I wanted to know more about what might be causing it. However, I have only had the issue appear once more since that post, and I've probably started the bike 30 times since then. (And BTW, thanks to a tip in this thread, I merely kept the starter button depressed after its initial 2-second crank, and it immediately cranked again and fired. To me, that is not even at the level of inconvenience.)

Lastly, I think all the best evidence points to this being a minor voltage drop/ECU program issue that has nothing to do with choke position. I have never used the choke when starting my bike (sorry, I know all the RTFM devotees are right now mentally lining me up for the firing squad) and it always starts quickly and runs smoothly. Personally I don't see the value in forcing my stone-cold engine to idle at higher RPMs when it starts just fine without the "choke" aka fast-idle control.

Just my $.02, but I think for most or even all of those about whom I've read, this is more a minor puzzle than a debilitating issue. My personal take is to check the battery size and condition per the excellent info earlier in this thread, keep the starter button depressed during those occasional instances when the bike doesn't fire after the initial 2-second crank, swing a leg over and enjoy!

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Happy to Be Here, in every sense of the phrase

Jayell

Hey, nice bike! I think it's mine.

BTW, I too experience this occasionally, and simply ignore it. When mentioned to my dealer, they said "Gee, we've never heard of that before." Who'd a thunk it?

wyomingpat

Perhaps leaving the kickstart in place would have been a great backup solution - getting too old to run and bump start like I used to when I was in a hurry!

kerfuffle

I have had this issue on my bike since it was new. The battery can be fully charged or not, choke in or out, engine hot or cold... It still acts up about every tenth time I start (but never twice in a row). My dealer has been over the bike, taken apart the wiring, swapped starter relay and battery to no avail. Finally they contacted Triumph, and they allegedly claimed that this is "normal behaviour", that a reset of the start procedure will be triggered if the crank position can't be determined fast enough. That could be true, but I also think that the explanation that high resistance if you start in a compression phase could cause this sounds plausible.

Although nobody would accept this on a new car, I agree that the problem is minor. I will absolutely try the suggestion to hit the starter quicker, and mot wait for the instrument self-test to complete. But wouldn't it be great if Triumph could get a fix out, or at least issue some statement about this.