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[Twolanerider]

Not a terrible breakdown as breakdowns go.  But the old Road Glide short circuited a road trip today.  I'm not totally pleased with the outcome so I'm going to vent a little.

Left here about dawn in a chilly rain to go riding to some undefined location via some nonspecific direction.  A little after 10:00 this morning stopped for the second tank of gas somewhere close to the SW suburbs of St. Louis.  Bike wouldn't restart.

It'd turn over.  Wouldn't fire.  I said a bad word or three. 

Pushed it to an out of the way area at the truck stop I was patronizing and started looking things over.  Noticed that ozone-ish dead electronics smell and said another bad word; or three.  Pulling the right side cover allowed the odor to really jump out of there.  For whatever reason it seemed the ECM had eaten itself.

A little more general looking around also found charred leads to the cam position sensor.  Don't know if they'd been impacted and the cam sensor was the chicken or the egg.  But it seemed the bike had multiple failures.  This ten minutes or so of snooping around caused several more bad words.

Have a spare ECM.  And a spare cam sensor.  Both at home.  Actually a cam sensor was in the saddlebag (come to think of it).  But fat lot of good it was going to do where I was with the tools I had.

As I used the phone to begin looking for bike shops within some reasonable distance at which I might leave the bikea guy from the fuel counter walked out and asked the obvious, "broke down?"  Grrr....  Then he said "there's a bike shop couple miles over.  He's a good guy.  Maybe can help."

Turns out the guy from the fuel counter was a rider.  Knew the shop well; and gave me keys to his pickup to go visit the bike shop.  Gotta love bikers.

Walked in anticipating that at best I'd pay the guy to store the bike until I could ride the bus back to Joplin and come back up in the pickup to retrieve the bike.  The guy had a "plan B" option. 

Of course no one is going to stock a Marelli ECM (or much else Marelli).  But he laid on his counter a package.  A (wait for it.....) Zippers "Marelli to Delphi conversion kit."  It's actually a Marelli to Blundermax (ok, Thundermax --- beggars can't be choosers) and Delphi conversion kit. 

The Marelli ECM is replaced with a Thundermax ECM that's packaged in a Marelli form factor enclosure.  Kit also swaps the Marelli throttle body and part of the sensor suite with a two piece Zippers 44mm throttle body and air cleaner.

In and of itself that wouldn't have got me home though.  Still had the cam sensor to deal with.  But with the Delphi-esque ECM upgrade the kit no longer needs the cam sensor.  Just unplug it and forget it.

Though I'd always seen some promise to the Thundermax ECM I can't stand Zippers.  The notion of spending money that would support them made my skin crawl.  But it would also be supporting a friendly indie shop and a guy that was going out of his way to be helpful. 

Oh yeah, the kit also includes o2 sensors and their auto-tuning module.  I'd be more interested in a good tune specific to the bike and no auto-tuning.  But it was a package.  And, again, beggars can't be choosers.

Guy wanted $750 for the kit.  Said he'd had it "a while" and apparently there wasn't a lot of interest in expensive accessory kits for 10 year old bikes.  So I'm sure he was marking it down some.  The price was equitable to two lost travel days and the concomitant frustration for bike retrieval.  And the guy even loaned me the few tools would need to install the package.

So after a few minutes of trying to talk myself out of it I'm off in the other guy's truck.  Parts and tools in hand to go work on the bike.  Had a sandwich at the truck stop then started to work.  Kit requires some small reconfiguration of the stock wiring to the ECU and data port also.  But nothing difficult and nothing that couldn't be changed back.  Started a little before noon and took the guy's tools back to him about 4:00.  Got back home to Joplin about 8:30.

I'm now a semi-proud owner of a Blundermax.

Thank god the little netbook computer was in the tour pak.  Entirely coincidental that I had it with me for other need but couldn't have got home today without it.  As expected the Zippers library's map that was "close" really isn't.  At least not close enough.  Quickly tweaked it a little at the one fuel stop on the way home and it was better though.  A little more tweaking and it'll be ok.

Ok, done venting.  The bike got home.  I got home.  So it must qualify as a good ride after all.

[RickC]

Hey, TLR!

Sorry to hear about your breakdown. Seems like things mostly worked out though.

As for the (Th/Bl)underMax...

I had one on my '07 FLTRI and I REALLY liked it. Enough so, that I've been waiting to get one on my 09SERG. It's been at Thunder Heart Performance since Wednesday for the install. (Thunder Heart in White House, TN, is the company that actually created and builds the ThunderMax. I live less than an hour away. So, it was really convenient to drop the bike off. I should get her back sometime next week, but I'm not sure exactly when.)

Now that I have my 2010 Fat Bob (no, it's not a CVO!), I've got wheels when I wanna ride and the SERG is in for service. Heck, sometimes, I've found myself choosing the Fat Bob for short rides just because...

Of course, with the torrential rains we've had in Middle Tennessee today -- and they're calling for more overnight and all day tomorrow -- it's not like I could do much (safe) riding anyway. In fact, most of the day, my driveway has been flooded out about 12" deep at the road. Even after that slacked off, every major road either was shut down or blocked by high water or was moving at a crawl because *everybody* was on it since all the other roads were impassable.

I'll let you know what I think of the ThunderMax once I get the SERG back.

Thanks!

[Twolanerider]

Rick, my issues with the Thundermax are more with the company and less with the device.  Not to completely understate I had issues with the device.  But they were more the company's fault than they were specifically the hardware.

Even when I first had it (their first gen of the device) you could see some promise there.  It came as part of a larger package of some machine work and an engine "package" of their devising. 

I made a mistake in trusting their "package" would actually be something that would work well in combination.  It didn't.  Their work was terrible too.  Not to belabor but the machine work sucked and the combination wasn't what they said it would be.  They lied.  The engine package was so far from playing well together the ECM couldn't make it run well.  Nothing short of massive detuning could.  Others have had different issues with the T-Max; some severe.  But those were mine. 

Early on their autotuning package made a lot of mistakes also.  That's been reported far less often anymore also.  But my experience working with them was terrible.  The only thing worse was their response and support after the fact.  There's a reason why the final build of the engine in the red bike gets called the buttonfly resurrection; it lost its Zippers.

The T-Max itself was far less the issue than the fact that in my experience the company was a bastard.  Because of this spending money that in any way benefited them wasn't my first choice.  Doing so got slow inventory off the shelf of a good shop though, it put money in his pocket and, well, it did get me home.

So I'm ok with it.  Especially if it means the bike actually got updated a bit.  It does start a little quicker.  I'll never have the old Marelli wandering idle thing crop back up again.  And I've got a lot of onboard monitoring and diagnositics that I can far more easily do myself now than I could when it was Marelli.  Me and the beer I'm drinking right now are just fine with that .