Hahahah.
For what it's worth, in case anyone else happens to run into this problem...
The starter relay / solenoid, for those that don’t know, is a switch that lets a low-power (your ‘start’ button) circuit switch a high power circuit (the starter itself).
I don’t know if it’s a case of a poorly spec’d part or what yet, but what happens is if the starter stalls (fails to turn the engine) and you hold the starter (which I had for a second or two) hoping to get the engine to go…the excess power is distributed as heat. It seems that in this installation, one of the terminals on the relay takes a good bit of the heat…and partially melts the plastic cap on the solenoid. This allows the conductors to sit a few thousandths of an inch out of level with each other…the effect being that when you hit the starter, the conductor that gets “pulled down” across the contacts does not make solid contact and there’s not enough juice flowing to crank the starter. This results in what I ran into on Sunday – I barely got it started, melting the solenoid in the process, and rode out to where I needed to be. When it came time to come home, I hit the button and got nothing but a “click” in response. Ended up having to pushstart the bike.
Had I felt ballsy (and as positive that this was the problem as I suspected then) I could’ve jammed a screwdriver across the relay terminals to fire the starter and put up with a shower of sparks in the process.
Contrast this with Busas which, if you don't hold the starter long ENOUGH, the engine can kick back hard enough to crack the crankcase.
