Scuba divers know it as a life saving practice - the buddy system. Maybe not so dramatic, but those of us that ride Enfields have all known a friend who's stator went out when away from home. In this case, a buddy system works just fine to get that bike into town.

When your stator dies and your engine is running, it will continue to run until the battery dies, and it will not, of course, recharge that battery. Then your bike dies and you pull to the side of the road. What to do?

You swap batteries with your buddy! Pull all unnecessary fuses (particularly the headlight fuse if there is daylight) then start your dying Enfield. Jump start the bike with the 'dead' battery, then drive away until the new battery dies. The good stator in your friend's bike will charge, at least partially, that 'dead' battery sufficiently so that when it is time to do the swap again you can do it and get the bikes started again. You might have to do this a few times, of course. Naturally, if you are riding in a group of more than two, you use any of the full function bikes to originate the jump start from.

This will severely tax those batteries, possibly doing damage as a result. But at least in some cases you can get to town this way.

Tip: To start a Royal Enfield Bullet with a completely drained/dead battery, remove the installed spark plug from your bike, reduce the gap to about half of what it is, re-install the spark-plug and then kick start the bike. Forget all about the gentle push kicks. You will have to kick smartly, with the throttle wide open. The engine will start with a lot of back-fires and will spit an cough and sneeze, but atleast, its started. Once started, ride it around for about 10 to 20 minutes, till the time your horn starts working, this will be a good indicator that you can cool the engine and re-gap your spark plug to its original specs. If your battery still does not charge, then you need to start investigating the electrics and battery itself

(Good biker etiquette then suggests that if those batteries develop trouble soon after you do this you might have to put a couple of them on your credit card.)

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