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Any ideas where to look for whatever this is with my 2016 RT's Power steering???

BUZZARD II

Member
New Years Day. I take my 2016 RT to meet the other riders for the annual ride. Runs good to the lodge. Turn it off for ten minutes to take photos of the club. Start it up again to warm up while putting on helmet, gloves etc.

Put it in gear and whoa, the steering is really weird. Stop, look at the tires, all good. Ride another half mile with considerable under and overseer and quite hard at that. I go home, figure the electric power steering just crapped out.

So, any ideas where to look? I've owned it since new, I figure 9 winters riding, this is a first.
 
First place to look would be in the shop manual. Look there to find out which fuses to check first. Also check the wiring going into the fuse box and to the power steering booster motor, or whatever the manual calls it. Might be on a relay. You need to look in the shop manual and look at the schematic if you have one, before you even know where to look. This is just general information for any typical trouble shooting.

Did you get any codes or warning lights?
 
New Years Day. I take my 2016 RT to meet the other riders for the annual ride. Runs good to the lodge. Turn it off for ten minutes to take photos of the club. Start it up again to warm up while putting on helmet, gloves etc.

Put it in gear and whoa, the steering is really weird. Stop, look at the tires, all good. Ride another half mile with considerable under and overseer and quite hard at that. I go home, figure the electric power steering just crapped out.

So, any ideas where to look? I've owned it since new, I figure 9 winters riding, this is a first.
Without BUDS, there's not a whole lot that you can do at home to find and correct the root cause, but there are some things you can check that will give you an idea of which way this is going to go.

For example, if you have a typical, finished concrete garage floor, go out to the bike, get on and start it up, and cycle your handlebars fully from left to right a few times. Once you get the feel of the level of effort involved, keep cycling the handlebars, then just as you start a swing from one side to the other, hit the kill switch and kill the motor. Keep cycling the handlebars. If you notice a distinct increase in level of effort and loss of assist, then everything is working. If not, then it could be a failure of the DPS motor. However, first, what you can check is that J-Case, 40 amp fuse in the left fuse box. I think it's number 3, but check your owners guide.

Other things to check - history has shown that voltage issues are most common in causing random DPS issues. It IS a power hog. So, cleaning and tightening your battery cable terminal connections, as well as determining your battery health and replacing the battery if required, has been shown to correct DPS performance issues. The system is designed to reduce assist as the voltage that it sees drops below 12v. And depending on the amount of assist that is being called for, the thing can easily draw 25 to 30 amps. A high resistance battery connection has been known to cause issues, because it momentarily drops voltage when the DPS asks for high amps. So you can look into all of that.

How cold was it? The DPS system will also shutdown on you if the board temperature falls below 14*F. Of course, that’s the design number. The actual number may vary. It was below that here in NEO. Also, if your turn signal Auto-Cancel was working, then that’s a good indicator that the Steering Angle Sensor is working. That’s how it knows that you made a turn.

So, good luck with it. A replacement DPS motor is pretty expensive. The Torque Sensor cannot be replaced separately without replacing the entire unit, although the Steering Angle Sensor can be. If you run out of things that you can do at home, it's dealer time.
 
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Yes it's fuse #3 and it is good. It was 27° when it stopped working. I've had it in colder. Yes I have a cement floor and it's messed up. Not too keen on riding it at 60 mph for 50 miles. But it does steer, sort of. Any thoughts out there on doing the ride to the dealer? My wife, who would have to follow me, is all no, no, no.
 
Yes it's fuse #3 and it is good. It was 27° when it stopped working. I've had it in colder. Yes I have a cement floor and it's messed up. Not too keen on riding it at 60 mph for 50 miles. But it does steer, sort of. Any thoughts out there on doing the ride to the dealer? My wife, who would have to follow me, is all no, no, no.

If you’re concerned about the DPS coming and going, and affecting your steering, then pull that fuse. The DPS motor can’t get power then, and you’ll be strictly manual. Any twitchiness after that is just you, or some other issue having nothing to do with DPS after all. Try it just around the block, get used to it, and go ahead to the dealer. It should feel about the way you’re used to at 60MPH, because at that speed, there was little to no assist, anyway.
 
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DPS stands for Dynamic Power Steering. It starts at 100% input at very low speeds and tapers to zero input at around 45 mph. At least that is how it is designed to work. The earlier models (basically 08-12) did pretty much the same thing, except that the DPS could take over steering at any speed if it felt it necessary. Very dangerous! They corrected this in later models.
 
Yes it's fuse #3 and it is good. It was 27° when it stopped working. I've had it in colder. Yes I have a cement floor and it's messed up. Not too keen on riding it at 60 mph for 50 miles. But it does steer, sort of. Any thoughts out there on doing the ride to the dealer? My wife, who would have to follow me, is all no, no, no.

I've found that the DPS cutting in and out erratically &/or at random has sometimes (often??) been due to a poor or faulty earth connection to/from the battery, often the big main earth that's on the end of the cable leading directly from the negative terminal on the battery to a bolt on the frame located down by the DPS in the 'tunnel' between the wheels/behind the battery.

If the DPS has died completely, or if it's pulling off to one side or the other ALL the time, then yeah, it can be a fault in the DPS &/or the Steering angle sensor etc, but that 'now it works, now it doesn't' stuff often enough comes back to just being as a result of a dodgy earth. This is especially so if you've replaced &/or moved the battery lately, or even just ridden on a rough road or played around with that earth cable leading back from the battery - and if any of those apply, it's usually the main earth that's closest to the DPS not being good. So make sure to carefully check the earths, especially the other end of that cable running directly from the negative battery terminal to where it's bolted to the frame by the DPS unit as mentioned above. 😉

Just note that, aside from just 'loose/not tight or clean' type poor earths, I've found a quite a few Spyders now, particularly pre-2018 models, where the lug that gets bolted to the frame might seem to be tightly affixed to a good clean patch of frame with good connection, but the lug itself isn't all that well secured onto the end of the cable... Apparently, that lug isn't always really well crimped &/or soldered onto the end of the cable from the factory. So if that earth cable gets moved much/often &/or vibrates a lot, or if the cable has been moving around a bit as you've ridden/done other things, make sure that your poor earth isn't simply because the cable itself is only loosely connected inside the lug!! 🤨

If that's what it is, then it's generally an easy enough fix, especially if you crimp AND solder the cable into the lug properly (it is a bit of a pain reaching in to that 'tunnel' to do the crimping & soldering in situ once you've got the left side front wheel off, but it is do-able without removing the cable entirely from the Spyder ;)) while the erratic kicking on/off halfway thru a corner, or 'assisting/not assisting' at random from the DPS can be a real pain and potentially quite dangerous; but I've seen a few Spyders now where our local (and not so great) dealer has replaced the DPS at a significant cost to the owner on the strength of those symptoms, only to have the same problem recur almost immediately, and then keep on doing so until that lug eventually gets fixed onto the cable properly!! You'd think their techs would learn about this issue, or at least that there's some record kept of things like that so they are checked before telling the owner they need to fit a new DPS, but apparently our local dealer doesn't keep techs who learn about any of this stuff for all that long 😖 - or maybe the dealer is deliberately pushing the DPS replacement as their preferred first fix option to maximise their income?! :mad:
 
Good top off Charge of the battery & clean terminals (ez access). Heck, load test the battery too! The cold spell might've been too much for it. Yes, check the earth ground at some point, see how well a charged battery does ya first.
 
Wow, thanks so much for all the info. To start I'll pull the fuse and give it a test ride. While a geezer, my shoulders won't object to the workout.

Give it a good charge, check, on it. Check ground. Not too sure about that, but I have a great independent mechanic who's an hour away, but manual steering would be OK for the ride.

Finally yes, that steering does seem to come on and off.

Just the idea of pulling the fuse has made my day. Thank you all so very much. You guys are great.
 
My original 08 GS came from the factory with a bad DPS. I had no idea because it never worked and mine was the only Spyder I ever rode. I put about 5,000 miles on it that way. One day, while Lamont and I were working on his bike, we needed some hardware. Lamont asked if he could ride my Spyder to ACE hardware to pick up the needed items. He rode down his twisted driveway and came right back.

'You need to put some air in your tires!' he said. 'This thing steers like a truck!'

'My tires are fine!' I replied indignantly. As always, he didn't believe me, so he put a tire pressure gauge on them to discover that I was right.

'Your DPS isn't working', he proclaimed. 'When did it quit?'

'It's always been that way.' I said.

I'm am currently on my 4th DPS unit for my beloved GS. The 1st 3 being of the original, faulty design, all failed.
 
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