Dyna Battery Removal and Replacement

Hi, welcome to "Fix My Hog." My name's Steve Knoble. We have an '05 Dyna up on the lift today, and we're gonna take the battery out of it and put it back in as if we were replacing the battery. This is a repair that most people are gonna have to do at some point in time of owning a motorcycle. So, we're gonna go through it step-by-step, show you which battery terminal to disconnect first, and which ones to reconnect first when you reinstall it. So, let's get to it. We're gonna move over to the right side of the bike and I'll start showing you the basic procedure from there. All right, we're over here on the right side of the bike, looking at the battery. First step we're gonna want to do is we have these two bolts here that actually hold the battery in place. This one holds the clamp backwards, and this one holds the clamp up. So, first thing we're gonna do is loosen this one, but not take it out, and then that will allow us to loosen this bolt and actually lower the battery down. So, we'll just kinda loosen that up right there. Now, I'm going to break this one free, and we'll start backing it off. And as you back it off, you'll see the battery lowers down a little bit. I'm gonna have to loosen this up a little bit more there, and back this down. Back it off until you have a nice air gap right around there where you know the bolt's loose. Oh, have to back it off a little bit. Few more turns. You know, your battery box has dropped all the way down. Now, from there, you should be able to pull the battery cover off, if you had one, and the lid right off the top of the battery cover, just like that. If you had a battery cover on this thing, you'd be able to lift it right up off of there. All right, now that we have our battery actually lowered down there, the next step from there is going to be lift the battery up just slightly out of the base of the pan, and pull the right side or the front, however you're looking at it, this side of the battery towards you a little bit. You should have enough extra room with your wires here. Hold onto your battery with one hand, and take your 10 millimeter wrench and loosen this up. And from there, you should be able to back this off. Now, you'll notice I have an extra wire on here, and that is for my trickle charger, slash, battery tender. So, we'll slide the battery tender wire out of the way. And from there, we unscrew this back, and we've now unhooked the negative battery cable. We'll push this off to the side and we'll take our battery bolt, stick it back inside our terminal. Thread in there lightly, so we don't lose it. Now, to avoid this accidentally falling into this and reconnecting, we're gonna take our battery, our negative wire here, and we're gonna pull it up through the top. First, we'll pull up the wire for the trickle charger, then we'll actually pull up the negative wire through the top there, and that'll keep it from accidentally coming in contact and reenergizing the battery. And from there, slide your base of your battery, slide your battery back into the base right there. Next, the step you want to do is you want to disconnect the positive terminal. So, you should be able to take this rubber boot that's on here at your fingertips, and pull it back and away from your battery terminal. Keep in mind, your battery is still pushed down so that we should have access to it right there. Now, once again, take your 10 millimeter wrench. Okay, let's push the red rubber boot down a little bit more. You can rock your battery to the side a little bit to give yourself a little bit more access. Now, you can take your 10 millimeter wrench. Turn your terminal out here. And back the screw out. Lift your screw up there. Move your wire for a trickle charger out of the way, and move your actual battery terminal wire out of the way there also. Then from there, once again, to keep track of the screws, we will thread it right back into the post. And of course, to keep that from reengaging, I want to move both wires off to the side so they don't reengage like that one just did. Move them up and off to the side. Out of the way. Your battery is now fully disconnected. All right, we're over here on the right side of the motorcycle again, and battery is completely disconnected. So, alls we have to do to pull it out is lift it up over this little lip in the battery tray, and slide it back towards you. want to be careful as you do this you don't bang the battery terminals on the frame here and arc out the battery. But you got a little bit of room and it's a little bit of clearance, so just close eye. Lift it up over that little lip right there. Slide it on out. That simple. Now, to put it back in, just reverse that process. Slide it back on in there. When it gets all the way in, it'll drop back down into place. Now from here, we can start reconnecting our battery terminals. First one we're gonna want to do is the positive terminal. So, we're gonna go back over to the left side of the bike, looking at the battery terminals, and hook those back up. All right, now, first thing we're gonna do is reinstall the positive terminal. And we're gonna do, woops. We're gonna slide the positive terminal in place there, making sure everything's clean, free of debris. Then we're gonna slide the tender terminal over top of that, if you have a tender. Then we're gonna take her actual screw here, slide it through the outer ring, the inner ring. Then hopefully, you'll be able to see it with my fingers in here, too. Slide that screw back into the hole. And the threads are a little recessed in there, so you'll be able to slide in a little bit before you get to the threads. Now, try to make sure everything's lined up, and start this in with your fingertips. You don't want to use power tools or anything, and a very light touch 'cause these battery terminals are lead, and it doesn't take a whole lot to strip 'em out. Lead's kinda soft. So, make sure your rubber boot is out of the way, thread everything in here with your fingertips until it makes contact. Make sure everything's flat back there. Your rubber boot cover here isn't pinching anything. And then from there, you can tighten up your battery terminal. All right, now that everything's ran down there finger-tight and flat, we want to tighten that up to 69 to 90 inch-pounds, and you don't need to use this many extensions. I'm just keeping the torque wrench off camera. Make sure everything lines up here, or everything stays out of the shot. And we're just gonna tighten that up till we get the click. Right there. Now, the last thing we're gonna do is take our rubber boot and move it up over top of the terminal, and this keeps the rubber boot, one, keeps dirt off it, and it also keeps it from ever potentially contacting the frame. And just slide up over the terminal. Now, kinda push down into place there, just like that. All right, the next thing we're gonna do is lift our battery back up out of the battery, up the base of the battery box there, then slide it on outta there. At least slide the right side here on out and take our terminal out or screw out the terminal. Slide our negative battery cable back into place here. Then slide our trickle charger wire back into place, also. Now, first we'll be able to take, put the bolt through the terminal there on this one. Start that in there by a few turns. Now, since this is a two-prong connector, not a ring one, I can then take this connector and slide it underneath the battery terminal, underneath the screw on top of the battery cable. And anything you add on, you want to put it on top of your battery cables. You want to make sure your main battery cables are directly to the terminal. That way your bike, your starter has the most power and the most contact surface to transfer all the amps to your starter when you crank the engine over. Once we do that, we want to tighten the terminal right back up, all right? Now, we're gonna take our 10 millimeter wrench. I'm gonna run this back in there. Run it as far as you can with your fingertips. Just give it a light snug. And from there, we can torque the battery to spec. All right, now, because it's a little bit of a challenge to get the socket and torque wrench on there, I have a bunch of extensions together. We will be able to reach in from the other side here and actually be able to get our socket on there and our torque wrench, and torque this down to spec. All right, next step we're gonna do is we're gonna slide our battery back into place. Bottom of it should drop down in there. Top of it should slide all the way back into place. Again, make sure our rubber boot is where it needs to be. I want to make sure that didn't touch the frame of the bike at any point during the process, take our battery cover or battery lid. Slide it on in there. Our battery's back into place. We're gonna take our socket wrench here. Tighten this top bolt up. This will actually lift everything up into place. Just snug that up. Make sure everything's sitting good. Check your rubber boots up here. Check your wires. Make sure nothing's pinched. Make sure your top of your battery cap is in place. Now that it's snugged up into place, you can gently run this one back just to make sure that one's snugged down. All right, and when that one's finger tight, you can torque it. Manual states 120 to 144 inch-pounds for this '05 Dyna, but of course, check your service manual. And it recommends first we torque the upper one, minus the extension. First, we will torque this one down here. Oh. All right, there is good there. Then we're gonna torque this one. 120 to 144 inch-pounds, as the shop manual states. And right there we go. Everything looks good. We're back together. We are ready to go ride. All right, there you have it. Terminals are hooked back up, battery's been reinstalled back in the bike. Now, we're ready to go ride. As you saw, it's a pretty straightforward procedure. Most people can do this themselves. I think the only tools I used was a half-inch wrench for the bolts on the battery box, and then a 10 millimeter wrench to actually take the terminals off the battery, and put them back on. So, that's all I really have for you today. This is "Fix My Hog." My name's Steve Knoble. Thank you for watching.