Battery Woes

I got an Anti-gravity li-ion battery (if that matters). Tested it before installing and got ~11.9V. Installed it and I got pretty much the same off the unswitched (white) lead to the ignition switch and the switched lead (brown) when I turned the key on. Plugged in the headlight and got both low and high beam working fine. Hit the starter button for like 1 second and it turned the motor. Turned the key off.

Dinked around for an hour or so hooking up the instrument cluster then turned the key back on. Nothing is working and I'm getting ~1.4V off the white and the brown (used to be) hot leads.

Test the battery again and sure enough I'm getting the same ~1.4V between terminals. Then it gets weird. Take the battery out and test it and the meter shows it rising from 1.4V. It's been out for hours now and its showing about 8.5V.

I love electrical work.

Pretty sure at this point I know nothing about batteries. Just tested it again and its up to 8.75V. Two meters and they both agree and the battery is just sitting on a table no charger connected.

Was the battery brand new? Typically, a brand new battery has to be charged for a specified time based on the charger you are using.
Otherwise, it's sounding like you have a drain on the batt even when it's not being used but if this was the case, you should have observed some sparking when you connected the battety (ie: an electrical load was present as you connected the terminals).
Best practice to installing a battety is connect positive (+) first, then negative (-) second. Reverse order when disconnecting (remove negative first, then positive) as this order will help prevent you from shorting the tool against the frame.
HTH

Bowman wrote: I got an Anti-gravity li-ion battery (if that matters). Tested it before installing and got ~11.9V. Installed it and I got pretty much the same off the unswitched (white) lead to the ignition switch and the switched lead (brown) when I turned the key on. Plugged in the headlight and got both low and high beam working fine. Hit the starter button for like 1 second and it turned the motor. Turned the key off.

Dinked around for an hour or so hooking up the instrument cluster then turned the key back on. Nothing is working and I'm getting ~1.4V off the white and the brown (used to be) hot leads.

Test the battery again and sure enough I'm getting the same ~1.4V between terminals. Then it gets weird. Take the battery out and test it and the meter shows it rising from 1.4V. It's been out for hours now and its showing about 8.5V.

I love electrical work.

You have described what happens if you discharge a battery. The voltage drops. Then if you let it sit, it drifts back up. I would charge the battery up immediately and retest. It's possible the battery was flat when you started it. There are three possibilities:

1) The battery is bad and goes down on it's own.

2) There is some kind of current drain in your bike that sucked the battery down while you worked on it.

3) The battery was never charged to begin with.

Did the battery come with an instruction manual? It probably needed to be fully charged prior to use.
From the following article, you have to be careful about what kind of charger to use & how to charge Shorai LiFePO batteries. using the wrong charger can overcharge a battery, a common cause of battery failure. Shorai recommends using a shorai charger for their batteries. It also says don't use a smart charger with a de-sulfation pulse mode (there are no lead sulfates in Shorai lithium batteries).

batterystuff.com --- Shorai Lithium battery --- charging

It's an Antigravity AG801 Lithium Ion battery brand new and it was reading 12V before I put it in, they say its fully charged from the factory.

I think I found the culprit, doesn't mean I know how to fix it however.

When the key is off the battery remains stable, actually creeps up towards 12V very slowly. When the key is on it discharges quickly. So I turned the key off, disconnected something, turn key back on see if its still draining. Got to the coil eventually, pulled the Red/Yellow lead to the coil and voila, no more draining.

Faulty coil? Or short in the starter button or kill switch?

OK, I was hallucinating, it's not the ignition coil that's drawing current with the key on, it's the field coil that's in the charging system. I guess then it makes sense that if I leave the key on and don't start the bike it's always going to drain the battery fairly quickly?