Brammo Owners Forum

That's an interesting idea, but I don't really feel too confident with messing with the power supply of the bike. Also, its not just the recharging system that's fried, but also the the part that connects the charging system to the battery.

Perhaps I'll get it fixed after all, and then start looking at eventually replacing the charging system myself, so the next time it fails, I would have more options on what I can do.

As I reported some time ago:

A few days ago, my bike stopped charging. I finally opened the bike up a bit and discovered that there was a blown fuse.

After a fairly long discussion with the bike dealership, they admitted that Polaris is no longer willing to stand by their electric bikes.

I don't believe that I did anything in particular to cause the original problem with the bike. I would ride it and recharge it every day. Then one day, preforming the normal recharge cycle destroyed the pretty much all of the recharging system. This is equivalent to having your bike catch fire while you refuel it.

Now I'm left with a dilemma. I could pay $4000 and get the bike repaired, or I could pay a lot less and tow the bike to a scrap yard.

If I get the bike repaired, the dealership is not prepared to offer any guarantee that the original problem won't happen again, so I may end up with another $4000 repair bill in the near future. If I get it repaired, I could try to trade it in for a Zero.

The alternative is to tow it to a scrap yard.

What would you do?

It should be fairly obvious that I'm rather disappointed in Brammo. Either their design wasn't built with sufficient fail safes to prevent this catastrophic outcome, or they didn't build the recharge system to specifications. Since they sold their bikes to Victory, there is nothing that Brammo can legally do to help me, and since Victory itself if going out of business, my Brammo Empulse pretty much has no future.

(Note that the dealership is going to start charging me storage fees because they are tired of seeing that bike on their lot, so I can't think about this for too long.)

I got the bike to the shop without any trouble, as the bike had sufficient charge to get there. However, I got some rather bad news once they had a look under the hood.

According to the service technician: the ev power charger pack had an internal short that caused wire damages that melted through the main harness and into dc converter box.

It turns out that this isn't going to be fixed by replacing a fuse! They want to replace quite a lot of hardware: the EV charger pack, the wires and even the DC converter box. It turns out that high voltage electronics is not easy, and when things go wrong, they really go very wrong!

I am thankful that the entire bike hadn't caught fire when the fault occurred as there was enough good design to prevent that.

Has anybody else experienced anything like that?

You must have a fine parts store near you - I wasn't able to find a replacement fuse anywhere I looked in Orlando. Lots of places have 15A fuses, but nobody had one that could take 125V. I'm going to have to buy a bunch of them online. That's okay, except that shipping costs more than the fuse, unless I buy a box of them, so that's what I'm going to do.

By the way, littlefreak3000, when you were wiring your custom brake light, can you recall which fuse burned out? It might be interesting to see (and document) which systems each fuse is protecting.

I've had a few problems with the instrument cluster, but I haven't seen it go completely black. Does it turn off, or does the LCD turn all the pixels to black?

The issues that I've had were:

• Humidity in the cluster causing the LCD to be illegible. It would eventually dry out after a few weeks.
• Water in the cluster which caused the tachometer and the LCD to fail after some time. I don't know how the water got in there. I left it at a dealership to get serviced, and when I got it back, there was water pooled under the tachometer!
• (Note that the first two issues were with the original cluster, which wasn't very water proof. Brammo had given me a few replacement clusters, and then finally, after the latest issue, they gave me the new version, which is much more water resistant!)
• The tachometer range got shifted, so that it went from 4 K rpm to max, rather than from 0 to 9 k rpm. After a while, it fixed itself.

I wonder if I'm getting this same problem.

My bike stopped charging at the Level 2 charger at my office on Thursday, but the Level 1 charger still worked at home. I was able to charge to 100% and make it to work. When I got back home on Friday, and tried to charge with the Level 1 charger, that failed to work any more.

Can anybody tell me how I can see if the connectors had melted? Or is the only way to to take the bike to the service department to take a look?

After quite a bit of back and forth, it turned out that while I was able to get a rear sprocket from a Victory dealership, they were not able to get me a front sprocket. I ended up getting one after asking nicely to a Brammo representative directly. They are not in the business of retail, so we had to get a bit creative in how I could buy the sprocket from them.

Something that I found a bit surprising is that the lady at the Victory dealership said that she was not able to get any response from Brammo about the front sprocket. I don't know who she was in contact with, or what she did to try to reach out to them. I hope things improve in the future.

Changing the sprocket set is actually quite easy! The most difficult part was removing the back wheel, since the axle rod is difficult to remove. (Hint, you need some kind of rod to push out the axle.) The front sprocket is held on to the motor with a C-clip. One tricky part of this process was knowing the torque to use for the bolts on the rear sprocket. Happily, this information is provided in the draft version of the manual that I got with the bike. I don't think that it's in the new version of the manual, so I don't know how anybody else has figured that out.

(If anybody wants it, I can send them a picture of those pages of Torque information.)