I hope Brammo can get you a satisfactory resolution to the charger problems. They have historically been very good about resolving issues, so if they are falling short I suspect it is due to overload rather than disinterest.
Don't be afraid to escalate if you feel you're being stonewalled or if the dealer is underperforming.
Much as I'm bummed, other than ranting here and in the one email I referred to, I'm biting my tongue and biding my time. I want to see it work. I want to have enough confidence to justify an Empulse in the next few years. Also bummed that just a few weeks after purchased, a no-miles Empulse comes up on the forums, in my neck of the woods, at a stellar price. *That* really gets me, right here <thumps chest>.
I don't doubt it'll get resolved eventually. It just seems this could/should have been caught by someone, somewhere, before it hit the sales floor, let alone reached a customer. At least it charges eventually, and doesn't affect riding or use. I'm fortunate that I can make it to work and back 2x without charging. If I had to charge at work in order to get home, as some do, it'd be a showstopper.
Ferrari in the 1970s and 1980s was infamous for exactly these types of issues. They were a boutique builder but without the rigor that they seem to possess today (see also Lamborghini).
From the sound of it, the Empulse has a higher degree of build quality. So I think Brammo is also improving over time .. not that it helps you with your Enertia Plus.
Correct. Quick background: In the early 90s I worked at a bike shop, the world's first, and at the time still only, mountain bike specific store. We had a few mass-produced lines (notably Specialized and GT), middle of their lines on up, and also boutique frames (Mantis, Salsa, Fat Chance, Yeti, Mountain Goat, Rock Lobster, Merlin, Bontrager). During my time there, front suspension came on the market, then rear-suspended frames. Mantis was just up the road from us, and we were close with the guys there and at all the above listed except the last two, so I had a good idea on what went on in manufacturing at small shops. Mantis was possibly the smallest shop of the list, producing on average 700-900 frames a year, for example, what was basically a two-man shop handling production plus time to prototype and test new designs. The Chumbawumba was originally designed for our shop and produced by a customer, who later bought when the original owner sold.
Granted, mountain bikes are not motorcycles. But at the time, things like "titanium" were new and exotic, people outside the government were still learning to machine and weld it. Making bikes as light as possible (since, you no, no motor to help haul it around) and still be as strong as possible were critical. Failures were awful, since the terrain failures occurred on were far from smooth, and riders wearing even BMX armor were few and far between. I remember one racer broke his collar bone (both sides?) when prototype carbon fibre bars sheered both sides off during a downhill. Every ounce mattered, but so did every detail, down to water bottle bosses.
That was 20 years ago, manufacturing methods to some degree may be consistent but design has grown easily with the help of computer and modelling software available at the consumer level, plus tooling has moved forward and come down in price. While this is "just" a nutsert spinning in place, it prevents the panel from being removed. As stated, my concern is that some day it needs to come off for service, the bike may be out of warranty then, and it's out of my pocket to address. No longer having a local dealer means I can't just point and say "hey, this is an issue, at least note it and see if we can resolve it soon, eh?"
The issue with the plastics... that's a bad design issue, IMO, and should be addressed. Loosening the bolts that hold the lower panel to remove it, just loosening them all so no one bolt held too much weight or stress, caused the upper right one (near the VIN tag) to crack it's upper arc off, leaving a bare hole dangling in the wind. I dropped a small washer on the bolt and it seems to hold fine, but that should not happen. Under 300 miles, there shouldn't be enough vibration or road stress to cause it to weaken up. Reassembling I noticed the holes in the plastic are very specific to where they line up on the bike, whereas any other bike I've ever touched the holes in the plastic are larger to allow for a little more wiggleroom with assembly. Holes too small, not enough margin between hole and edge of plastic, plastic not as flexible as what I see on Suzuki, BMW, Ducati, Yamaha, and the thickness of the plastic near the mounting holes, all factors that I think led to it cracking the first time bolts were loosened. I feel all those contributed, and all of those, again in my opinion, constitute poor design. The four brands I cited all do what I suggest, and likely all do it for the same reason: extend the life of the plastic, and make service and assembly easy. Not sure about Honda, never owned or worked on one.
If a discrepancy exists between what you see on the dash and what you see with the log parser, I would suspect the log parser first of containing an error. We're mostly just guessing at what the values in the log files mean - there's no documentation on the files.
What I expected, which is why I pointed it out as I did, rather than imply that the dash is wrong and the bike never being fully charged.
The entries that read well less than 100%, those are still a question mark for me.
BTW, Protomech, at least for Enertia+ logs, using your log viewer, position 17 looks to be amps. I can see the graph initially jump to 9, then drop to 1 or 2 and hold there the duration of the time AC is plugged in.
It is pretty cool when guesses work out though : )
Yeah. Just wanted to point that out in case it helps make more sense of what you're parsing or if you wanted to add a label to that function slot in a later release.
