Talk Morgan Forums Morgan Sports Cars Morgan Three Wheeler & Super 3 Battery replacement

Apparantly in cold weather a lithium battery works better as it warms up under load - so the advice is to sit there with headlights on for 30 seconds or so before trying to start.

New battery fitted and just works! Cranks the motor over in fine style.
It's a bit shorter than the original so had to mount a couple of spacers fore and aft to make sure that it sits properly in the tray. The lack of weight feels completely wrong compared to a traditional lead acid battery - hopefully it does contain trendy lithium cells and not just a very small lead acid unit!
Battery is by JMT (whoever they are) came from the bay of E and hopefully will continue to just work for a long time.

Less than 2kg!! Wow...

So there will be an incredibly small increase in performance due to the weight saved!

Wonder if they do a car one for the Plus 8?

You can get lithium batteries for everything. Just depends on what spec you want em to be.

I have to say I'm not really comfortable with LiOn battery technology for starting cars. The technology has been around for over 40 years, but it was only in the 90's that Sony made it practical by introducing onboard software that monitors the battery and shuts it down completely (bricks it) when it senses the battery is at the end of its life.

This was found necessary because unlike old lead/acid technology LiOn batteries fail to an effective low resistance, drawing substantial current from the charge source that can no longer be absorbed by charging the battery. It does instead simply dissipate the power in heat, eventually melting the body or exploding, unless some mechanism is in place to terminate. You only have to look towards laptop recalls in Japan, Boeing 777 groundings and very recently on a popular top of the range Smartphone to realise this is an ongoing issue.

This leaves me with two concerns, the possibility of the bricking software failing no matter how remote, as the consequences would be severe in this application. Also the strong likelihood of the software bricking the battery prematurely with no warning, since manufacturers are going to err on the side of caution. I have heard that max five years is typical in this application which I agree may be regarded by some as adequate but maybe not given the price.

Calum the link you give takes you to a YTX30-FP which is 8.17Ah. Is that correct? It warns that you need a special charger so that's more expense.

Tim

That's the one I got. It came fully charged and I don't intend to use a charger on it; if it gets low then I'll jump start it with a booster pack then let it charge off the alternator. It should be very fast charging anyway.

540 cold cranking amps! That's almost double the Banner isn't it?!

Maybe being a bit picky but I think it was Boeing 787 Dreamliners that were grounded, not 777's.

That's what's on the spec sheet; certainly cranks the X-Wedge over at a fair old rate.
From what I could find on some bike forums the JMT batteries seem to get a good name, some other lithium batteries get slated and it sounds like there are a few out there that simply do not have the sort of built in circuitry that gives them a chance of working properly. Hopefully time will show that this one continues to just work!