Ahem....
As to the topic at hand..
Typical shunting type regulators are generally what are used in most UJMs that people find. And, with almost every manufacturer (honda, Kawi, Zook..etc) they were built and designed by the cheapest bidder...but that doesnt mean they dont work.
Most often what causes failure of a RR unit is heat build up. This is the result of a couple of different possibilities but not limited to one. Most often, corrosion of the connectors (those cheap bullet pieces of shit
) causes resistance, resistance causes heat, heat causes the RR to fail. Its worth while to, even on your "finished" project, running well or not, go back through, and do a few things. One or ALL of these are good ideas...
One: remove the old crappy bullet connectors and install fresh shiny new spade type weather proof connectors. You can even go so far as to heat shrink them to eliminate any weather from greatly speeding up corrosion, but keep in mind if you do, you'll likely have to cut them off and replace them if you have a failure...you only have so much wire (yes, you can always splice in more, but anywhere theres a splice/connector there is the chance for resistance)
Two: give all of your connections a nice little dab of dielectric grease. This will help ensure a nice clean contact path for your electrons to travel through
Clean wiring is happy wiring
Three: (And this may be limited for some of you...i dont know the wiring for EVERY bike...) Eliminate the wiring loom from your charging path. Ideally, the best way to do this is to wire your stator directly to your regulator, and your regulator directly to your battery with an inline 25-30amp blade type fuse holder to simply protect the battery. Many bikes have redundant wiring looms. For instance, Suzuki in their non-retooling for shit, infinite wisdom, had one leg of the stator wired to the headlamp switch when having said switch was legal. When it became illegal in many areas, they didnt bother re-mapping their loom...they left it. So you have this leg of the stator that had to run power through the ENTIRE length of the bike, through multiple connection points before it got to the RR...As you can imagine, over the years, and johnny neglectful owning said bike, the corrosion built up...and one day it didnt charge anymore...
So by eliminating the loom from the charging path, you eliminate any potential resistance problems other than those in the charging path itself.
For those of you with later model RR with a 6 wire set up, usually that 6th wire is a "sense" wire. Its used to sense the voltage of whatever circuit its wired to. Usually switched power (dont wire it to unswitched power or it will drain your battery) such as a tail light, etc. Problem is usually tail light circuits power something else on the bike as well. This means long runs of wire. Longs runs of wire generally mean at least some voltage drop. Voltage drop on the sense wire will cause it to think that the battery needs to charge when in fact it may not, and can cause the RR to allow the battery to over charge. Wire your sense wire somewhere close to the fuse block. I use the ignition switch. Pretty short run (from the block to the switch and back) and its switched power.
Lastly, if you want the latest and greatest in shunting type regulators, go with a MosFET type regulator. These can be found pretty cheap used on Ebay from a Honda Foreman or Rubicon built in or after 2006. Usually around $25-$50.
FET type regulators act MUCH MUCH faster than standard SCR types. Every time a regulator shunts power (that is, diverts overcharge to ground) it creates heat. We know from earlier what heat does to an RR. FET types do it so much faster that they generally create very very little heat.
Now, get out there and clean up your charging system