Battery Musings

I took out the battery a couple days ago to clean the tray and replace the stock bolts with some lightweight aluminium versions. The stock battery tray is held in place by 5 M8 X 25mm bolts. Pix below of stock battery tray after some cleaning. Boy was it full of sand and other road grime.

I promptly replaced the mild steel stock bolts with some aluminium items

Saves some weight and looks trick eh? But there's a problem. The stock bolts have flat hexagon heads while the aluminium bolts have socket cap heads which have a higher height and protruded from the well. This resulted in the battery and its plastic tray unable to seat properly as everything was resting on top of the 5 bolts. So I had to remove the aluminium bolts and put back the stock items. Sigh :(

Battery reinstalled with blue anodized titanium nuts. I'm currently on my second Delkor maintenance free battery. The first one lasted me close to three and a half years. Highly recommended. The Helix Cap 33 has been ditched. Anybody interested? Comes with trick real carbon mounting bracket.

This also got me thinking if I should replace the mucho heavy NS70 sized battery (>20kgs) with an Odyssey item. The Odyssey PC680 weighs 7kg only while the PC925 weighs 11.8kg but has more reserve capacity. Apart from saving lots of weight saved, the extra engine bay space reclaimed due to the smaller sized Odysseys will enable me to run something like an ITG Maxogen carbon airbox. Pix below of the stock and very restrictive resonator piping. One end leads to airbox while other end leads to the wheel arch fender.

Time to start saving more money..