Ah, breathe. Right, tried to start to warm to drain oil. Gave it 3 or 4 5 second bursts as stated in manual with 10 seconds in between. Ended up Lo Bat. Hoping it's just battery but it was on optimate overnight 2 nights ago. He said it was "New" but I've seen batteries die in 1 year with alarms if not charged. Started 2nd time on Tuesday when I bought her. She nearly catches then dies, is there a trick to starting the 999? What battery voltage should I have? How many attempts at starting before Lo Bat pop's up? Really hope it's not the sprag clutch. Can I try to wire her up to one of my other bikes batteries to see?
12.6 volts is classed as a fully charged battery........12.3 volts and it either needs charging or it's duff. It's seems odd (to me) that nearly everyone that has battery issues, it's when an Optimate is used.
It's important to not touch the throttle Also @Exige's cable kits are imho essential if you want your Ducati to start properly
Charged the battery on the normal charger and it said full in 10 mins, tried again with heath Robinson exact Start and another fail. Put battery on Optimate and its gone straight to 'save". Can I test with the 996 battery?
Optimate finished saving and said charged. 12.6 first try and down to 12.4 Nearly starting, not quite catching.
!2.6 coming straight off charge is not enough.........It should be at least 13+..........sounds like you have a shitty battery. What will sod your sprag up is a low charged or failing battery...........the sprag can't fully grab hold, it seems...... That's what happened to mine.....I had a seven or eight year old conventional battery which was dropping to 12.3 volts after two days charge.........changed the sprag and fitted a new conventional Yuasa battery.......checked the OEM lead connections were OK and since then it fires up easily. The new battery if not charged every so often will drop from 12.6 to 12.4 after a few weeks.... As far as I can establish, a fully charged conventional battery will lose approximately 0.1% voltage per day if not charged and with no drain.
Might not be........Try charging for longer if it is safe to do so.........(see if is getting quite warm or hot which is obviously dodgy)......but if it comes off charge and reads 13+ (or higher), just leave it for about there or four hours and see what it drops to......I would expect 12.8 approx.
Been on optimate for nearly 3 hours and still showing "charge" think it's fried. Bought a new Yuasa from halfords, will try it I'm a bit. Batteries come full charged once you put the liquid in right?
Don't be tempted to keep trying to turn it on the starter if it's not going to go, that will kill the sprag eventually. I had to put one in the 1098R a couple of months ago for the same reason.