Bad Ground and solicitation for wiring tips

[cutter]

My '00 m900 has an electrical gremlin that sounds like a bad ground. Not constantly, but often enough to be a pain in the ass, it will click when I push the starter button. Its much like when the battery is low on charge, but it isn't. I had a similar issue the first year I had the bike, and I basically resolved it by reseating all the fuses and futzing around with all the electrics under the seat. This solved the issue for a season, but this spring it came back. Now that we're in peak riding season I'm going to take my monster off the road for a bit to go over the electrics, check all the connections and also clean up their routing on the bike, hopefully weeding out the grounding issue.

Anybody have any pointers on rerouting or potential culprits. I do have a accessory port for a heated vest, which is tied into the positive terminal of the battery and grounded to the tank bolt. I was thinking of moving the ground to the battery instead just to eliminate a variable.

As

[printman]

After I had everything that needed a ground point powdercoated, I decided to run a linked ground.

Used 14 gauge wire and ran it from the furthest ground and attached it to the next, until it lead back to the battery. Electrical system felt much stronger after that.

Easy to make and if it works you'll now if the grounds are weak.

[Howie]

Could be a bad ground, could be high resistance anywhere in the starting circuit.  A good volt meter is your friend in this case.  You want to find where your voltage loss is.  this is done by measuring voltage drop, the voltage consumed be each connection, wire and component in the system.  Ducati does not publish specs for this, so I will use any car specs, .5V for the whole 9 yards, .2V for any connection or wire.  Ideally, you will have 0V, but this will not happen, particularly on a bike since the wiring is marginal.  Since you suspect it is a ground issue, let's start there.  Take your meter and place the negative lead on the battery terminal and the positive lead on the engine ground bolt.  When you crank the engine the meter should read less than .3V  .3 or higher , place the meter in parallel with each connection and wire until you find the resistance.  Repair as needed.  Now do the same on the positive side, positive terminal on battery, lug on starter.  .5 volts or higher, parallel for each connection and  the solenoid.  Repair as needed.

[Porsche Monkey]

I would start at the battery ground and move down the line from there. It may not be a bad idea to replace the main ground cable off the battery seeing that its 8 years old. I've replaced both my battery cables because of this same problem. You can make your own, you don't have to use oem.

[cutter]

Thanks for the pointers- I'll have to borrow a friends volt meter, I don't have one. Porschaholic, out of curiosity, what did you use for replacement cables?