First rain of the season in San Francisco produced a disconcerting symptom: At standstill, the bike would not start up with a slight twist of the throttle. No fault code, just no go. Drivers behind me suddenly discovered their horns.
Twisting a bit further, and the bike lurched forward with enough torque to spin out the rear wheel. This was not a fun way to make my way through rain-slick streets in heavy city traffic.
I arrived at Scuderia West by keeping my foot on the rear brake while applying the throttle at each startup. The symptom was intermittent and did not occur while the bike was moving, only at full stop.
Mark, the service manager, immediately consulted Brammo headquarters, and found that they had not had this symptom reported, even in Oregon with all the rain, so once again, I got to serve as a first-time reporter! I also was the recipient of Brammo's excellent warranty service through their local dealer.
Brammo figured that the issue was in the throttle itself, which made sense to me. Randy, our local Brammo tech at Scuderia, followed the suggestion of blowing out the throttle with compressed air and squirting in some water displacement fluid (WD-40). This simple fix worked: No more problems the rest of the very rainy very busy day. No more a-hole-puckering starts!
This morning, before I headed out into the rain again, I applied some black vinyl tape to the throttle switch housing, to limit the ingress of water through the crack of the two halves. I'm also considering adding an O-ring between the grip and the housing, something I've done on other bikes to serve as a cheap cruise control. This time it would be to limit moisture's access to the rheostat (if that's what one calls the control).
And what does one call the whole assembly, since it's not "throttling" anything??
