in all My years of bikes I have had to replace only one stator but several rectifier/regulators.... back before most of you were even born the thing that burned out was the selenium rectifier.... it simply rectified the AC voltage coming from the alternator and made it into DC.... now days it's a combo of a selenium rectifier and a voltage regulator, which is good because getting 15 volts out of the old bikes was not unheard of.... (you just turned on the head light and kept going,... if you knew you were going to be running near top RPM's ! LOL
Component failure can and will take out the entire charging system not alwayse but it certanly can... My 700cc shadow did that to me because of a short which fried the regulator and altenator and the battery , I parked it and left it for almost a week and when I got back to it it was dead as a door nail ... the battery was still hot...but the damage was already done ! half the wireing harnis was burned up too ! .... it made me sick ! and much poorer too ! at a time when I had neither the money or the time to fix it....
it was over 300 bucks to fix it right at that time and that was half the bikes value at the time, but I fixed it anyway ! ....
it was a really nice reliable bike.... until one night riding home i am cooking along on a back road I knew by heart and the headlight goes out ! no high beam no low beam... no dash lights,no tail light but it's still running...
i was in the middle of a corner when it happened and I got on both brakes as hard as I daired and still wound up in the ditch..... which was good.. because the other side was a 150ft sheer drop to the creek below....
i turned it off and as I did so the lights flashed... so I played with the switch and they came back on ... I road home slower and it did it again...
this time I wiggled the key and the lights came back again.... I pulled the key switch and the bottom of the key switch fell off in my hand.... and it's spring... I cleaned the contacts lubed it and put it back together and never had a problem with it again, but I've often wondered if that earlier electrical problem had anything to do with the key switch falling apart or not HAHAHAHA
.....
later !
Bob......