A pretty common procedure that you need to do when doing certain types of brake work on a Harley-Davidson is you need to bleed the ABS system.
It’s a pretty simple Functional Test. It only takes a couple of minutes so I’m going to walk you through it with an ETHOS Edge.
First thing we need to do is go into Scanner, and we already have it hooked up to the bike so we’re going to choose Harley-Davidson and do an automatic ID, so it can tell us what the bike is.
It’s going to let us display either all of the systems or it could have or just the systems that are on this bike so we’ll just do the fitted systems, to tell us what’s on the bike.
There’s the vehicle so hit OK and we’ll have a couple of different options so let’s go to Antilock Brakes.
We need to determine the computer and once that’s done we go to Functional Tests, then Special Functions.
There we have Bleed Brake System. Click on that and it says: “This test is for bleeding the brakes. Make sure the ignition is on with the engine off for the entire test. Carefully follow the test procedures.”
Press Continue to initialize the module and once that is done, select Continue again to make your choice between front brake, rear brake and both. On the next menu we’ll select which one.
In this example we’ll just do the front one so we’ll go there, then it tells you to make sure you do the manual service draining procedure to the front brake system according to the service manual so once that’s complete, press Continue.
The next step is to activate the front brakes with as much pressure as possible, and release after the beep.
At this point the brake should start to have some resistance. Check it and press Continue again. The ABS module for the bleeding sequence is then initialized.
After that, activate the brakes with as much pressure as possible and continue holding until the tool beeps and the next screen appears. This takes approximately one minute.
Release the brake after the beep, then you are advised to follow the service procedures according to the service manual. You may need to manually bleed the brakes again right now so wait for 30 seconds before running the procedure again.
The test is now complete and it only took a couple of minutes.