Dayum! I thought $160 for a Harley AGM was bad, but $32k for a new battery must be a record.
I also wondered if it was possible to find a good AGM battery for less than the H-D price, and was planning to do a little research at the end of the season and just go ahead and change mine. As luck would have it, mine was working fine, the bike sat for two days in the garage due to lousy weather, and on the third day it wouldn't even light the headlight much less turn the engine over. So it was off to the dealer instead of having the time to find a better deal somewhere else. Funny how these things can go just like that.
One caveat on the internet or other low price ideas. Make sure you aren't getting an old battery; anything over 6 months beyond the date of manufacture is too old in my opinion, especially if the battery hasn't been kept fully charged. And I don't know of many places that take batteries off the shelf on a set schedule to charge them. Harley doesn't have the nice plain English date stickers on their batteries that you will find in most other places, so you will need to read the manufacturing code branded on the top front edge. There will be a long string of letters and numbers separated into 3 groups, something like this: xxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxE0 xxxxxxxx. The last two digits of the center group is the date code, in the example it is May 2010 (A=Jan, H=Aug, skip I, J=Sept, M=Dec).
I agree with Don (Twolane); the H-D AGM batteries have proven to be excellent and I don't really see a need to try to reinvent the wheel. Rather than go with an unknown, maybe you can get one at one of the 20% discount dealers.
Jerry
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Topic: ? On a replacement battery (Read 4506 times)