6V battery charging simplified by Francois Roux
I was constantly annoyed by losing juice from somewhere on my M1 Chang. I completely renewed the electric wire system, but for some reason it often happened that I was running out of current after some days of storage in my garage.

The causes might be multiple and difficult to solve easily. This is emphasized by the general limited (low?) performance of the generator and the small capacity of the 6V battery. And, when the evidence comes that you have no way than to recharge the battery again, I always disliked putting my hands in those small spaces to remove with pain the small accumulator.

One day I had the stupid idea to think that I could probably make a very simple system that could:

  • Allow the easy charging sequence with the battery in place, meaning avoiding removing it, and playing this nasty game with the quick lever, my knees to maintain it, and the bracket...
  • Allow to give the power to the bike, with an external source (another battery for example). This was very useful for me when checking the electric system putting new LED lights and risking shortcuts or other mistakes. I didn't want to harm or discharge my brand new battery that was already on the bike, and I had an old one that could do the testing job perfectly.
  • Allow, when you don't use the bike, to simply cut the electricity and avoid the loss of juice. I'm not an engineer and I'm learning as I'm doing. As I don't have the capacity and knowledge to track carefully where those 0.05 V leak(s) is (are) coming from, I preferred using a more radical solution!

Well, all those good reasons lead to this:.

I bought this plastic plug that anyone can find in an electronic store. Note that those plugs fit only one way, meaning that + goes into +, and cannot be inverted to avoid shortcuts, and it has a kind of little lock system to avoid self unplugging even in a vibrating environment.
Here is an example of what you can connect to your bike for giving another source of current, or to the battery to recharge it, when staying in place.
I have decided to cut off the wires of the battery leaving around 15cm (6"), to connect the plug.
Assembling the plug is easy as a child game. Just make sure carefully that when assembling male and female and + and - poles, they are relevant with the standard norms for type of plug.
Here it goes when completed. It's clean and easy.
Of course I did equip my regular battery with the same system.
Here you can see how easy it is to recharge the battery...
...and how easy it is to substitute the regular one with an external one.