Softail M8 Battery Removal and Replacement

Well, it's the moment you've been waiting for: battery R&R. You know, this whole new design, the good old days of a battery sitting right under the seat, like I said, with the oil tank wrapped around it, that's all over now. They had to put the battery somewhere on the motorcycle, and it's kind of buried on it. You know, it's not as user-friendly as your old softails, but after you do it three or four times, probably not gonna be that big of a deal. We're gonna start by just disconnecting the negative cable. I'll probably cover up the pipes here just a little bit, we don't want to scratch no chrome. But before we take the negative cable off here, you gotta remember, we've already had all these panels off. You had the little plastic tray that went down here, it was encapsulated by this cover. So a couple more steps just to get to that, couple more steps just to get to your tranny dipstick. That's just the way they designed the motorcycle. Set that aside. 10 millimeter wrench, I happen to have the cool guy ratcheting one just for motorcycles like this. You know, it just makes it a little easier to work on. I can see he's got an accessory ground wire on here also, because as I mentioned earlier in the video, the battery tender is hard wired in. It's not going to the battery. It's going into the wire harness somehow. So he's got an extra power point on this motorcycle. One nice thing about the oil tank, not being here besides sitting on it and baking your battery and your butt. This really should cure the days of something because forever and ever soft tails they've had the oil tank up here the oil pump down there it's called gravity. Eventually it would kind of bleed by the oil pump. Over winter time. The bikes sitting five months, oil would incrementally bleed by the oil pump and fill up the crank case. And everybody that has an old Harley remembers he'd start the bike up in the spring. It would puke all that oil out of the crankcase either into the air box. If it was a top end breather or if it was a really old bike like 92 or earlier bottom end breather, it'd puke all that oil out on the ground. The worst part is people would check their oil and go, Oh I don't have any oil in my bike. And they'd add two more courts, all that oils in the motor all that oils in the tank, all that oil is everywhere. So those days are gone for the softtail. So that's kind of a nice little design. Okay. Negative cable out of the way. Yeah. We're going to just put it down here. Now back to your little wire harness here, you got to unclip that we did that earlier. Get these wires out of the way. We're going to disconnect the wheel speed sensor here push the tab back, pull it. I'll give you a shot of that here. At least this tab really works nice. You know, you, you depress it here. Point that out, just push on the backside of this. Thing just slips right out. Get that out of the way and what we're going to do next. We're going to take the oil fill dipstick out and we're going to put a piece of tape over that hole. It's just going to buy us a little more room here. You can stuff a rag in there and do whatever you gotta do but I'm just going to put a piece of tape on it. Okay. Now you got the manual out. You're looking they have a little diagram there of showing you how this thing is kind of tucked in because what it is it's a big plastic tray. Okay. We're going to get this clip here and let me get these wires out of the way. Kind of tuck them up there. Okay. Now you've got a pretty good view of that clip. Shows the rate in the manual. So let's just pry that thing back. Okay now we're going to remove this wheel speed sensor wire here. And it's, it's got a, it's got a little maze. It goes through and these little guides things hold the wire. What you got to do is you kind of got to get them over that that thing there. And you might need a, I don't know you might need a little nose pick. You want to be careful with the wire. Of course. Just kind of pry it forward a little bit, there. Then you can push it back here, push that thing forward. So let me show you get a close up here. Here's your wire that goes around that little hook around that hook. And then this thing's got a little slot that it locks into. You're going to get good at doing this because this is where your battery is. So we can get that out of the way. Tuck it down. Now we're getting closer to getting this plastic tray out of here. pulled it up a little bit, kind of start working it around. We got to get it off this. You can kind of take your finger and stick it in from the back and push forward on the little latch to get it unlatched from the top one and then way in the back here. Once we get it out, I'll show you what you're up against. Get a flashlight, I think. Oh, there we go. Okay. So what I would is get your manual and look at it. And it's going to show you where these tabs are. There's a tab for this slot here and that's what was kind of holding it up. And then of course, there's a tab up here and then you got your latch there. So, it's one busy little piece of plastic. And of course, now this covers the positive terminal. So now I have access to the positive terminal. If you were say, you're just doing the 5k or the one K and you're checking battery terminals. You still pretty much got to pull this out. I mean, you probably could maybe pry this up to check the negative or positive cable, but it just it's going to give you more access to that positive cable. All right let's set that aside. Long screwdriver I'm going to go around and I'm going to take the positive screw out of the battery. Now, peak down in there, pretty accessible now I just kind of let it rest there. I think what I'll do is take a needle nose and grab it. Like I said he's got a power lead on here. So that kind of helped me grab that thing out of there. And I'm going to take it off. We don't want to drop it. Okay. pull that away. Come back around. Or if you read in the manual it says it's got a little strap down there. That's what this little thing is flapping right here. It's kind of to help you extract the battery. So, you're going to be doing some tugging here that helps lift it up. In fact I'm going to take this wheel Spencer or wheel speed sensor lead. I'm going to stick it out the back of the swing arm here. Just get it out of the way. Okay. Pull up on the strap and start wiggling this battery back. There you go. There. It is Not as easy as the old softtail but like I said, you do it five, 10 times. It's going to be pretty simple. Let's go ahead and clean up these terminals here and get ready to put the battery back in. All right with the battery out I'm going to show you one other kind of nice feature here. They cut a little window out here. So if you ever in the future ever have a problem with your speed sensor, let me get a flashlight. I'll kind of point it out, look down from the top and I'll I'll just kind of point to it with the screwdriver here. Kind of makes it a little more accessible. I mean, it's going to be while for this thing fails but it happens in the future. So there it is. They put a little cutaway in the battery tray. Okay. Just wanted to bring that up before, I forgot. Now you got your battery out. Obviously you're gonna want to take a little wire brush clean up your posts. You know, you want a nice, good contact. This thing isn't rubber mounted. It's rigid mounted, but still battery cables come loose. That's why they're saying every 5,000 miles check your battery cables. And when they come loose, I'll show you what happens. I got a battery here. That's got a problem like that. Now this is a little exaggerated but this is how the motorcycle came into the shop, aftermarket battery. You know, he's supposed to have the little spacers on here. I don't know if he had them improperly installed but he ran this thing Loose and this motorcycle actually ran. It just barely started the bike, but that's kind of what can happen when you have loose battery cables. It just generates a lot of heat and it just melts the post down so don't be this guy. Get that out of the way. Okay. Now, depending on how old your battery is if it's showing you signs, you got it out of the motorcycle and you want to just see where it's at. You can put a volto meter on it. This battery is obviously in really good shape, 12.77, almost 12 eight. If the bike, you know, was showing you signs and groaning the batteries in the bike you're going to want to run it with the volto meter. It should be pushing 14 plus volts. So pretty rudimentary stuff. It's in your manual. Pretty easy to do so. Okay. We got the post clean. Now you've got to kind of clean out your valley way here. Our wires, tuck them back over. You got to lay this battery strap thing out. I mean, it's kind of handy to get the battery out. So just lay that down. nice and flat. Get your wheel speed wire out of the way. Kind of look at your positive terminal and we'll see where that's at. It's out of the way. It's pretty clean shot. No debris. All we got to do is slip this battery back in. You kind of can't it like this and then maybe grab your strap here. We go back in and now there's my strap. You want to make sure you, you still have access to that. Okay. put the battery in place. We're going to go ahead and hook up the positive terminal while the plastic shield is off. So I got to go back around the other side of the bike here. Okay. First thing I want to do is kind of take a peek and see where the positive cable ended up. See how we're going to do this. Probably do is I'm going to pull it up, grab on to it. I'm going to grab my accessory lead that he's got on here. Pull that up. I think we'll put the battery bolt in now and see if we can kind of walk this thing down there without dropping it. It's really not the most user friendly setup but, going to have to get used to it. So now if I kind of keep a little pressure on here I think I can walk it right down to the post All right. Get a little light on it here. Okay. I got a thread started. We're going to snug it up. And now with that plastic tray out of the way I'm actually going to torque it to spec because I won't have access to it. If I put the plastic tray on. So, looking into manual something I didn't really agree with is they're saying six to nine foot pounds. So I went back and looked at the 2017 touring manual. Cause I thought that sounded funny. And it does on the touring manual, they're saying 60 to 70 inch pounds. So, I look at my torque wrench, my foot pound torque wrench. It doesn't even go down that low. There's no way I'm going to torque that six to nine foot pounds and be accurate without stripping it. What you're going to want to do is take six times 12 that's 72, nine times 12 is 108. We're kind of set it somewhere in the middle and torque it to inch pounds. So right around 85, 90 inch pounds, I think you're going to be way safer than trying to torque your battery bolts to foot pump. So inch pounds not Newton meters, Even that seems a little high, but There. So I, I definitely, probably wouldn't go max spec you don't want to be stripping out your battery cable bolt. And obviously you want to be very careful that your negative cable is no way in the area. Cause there's a lot of metal you could touch in there and boom, you'd be sparking up a storm. Okay. That's in now we're basically we're ready to put our little plastic tray back in and it's probably going to take a little patience. Let get my flashlight. Okay. We'll get set up. Put this in now that I think of it I'm going to cover up the positive post. So I might as well put a little dielectric grease on that now, before I cover it up. So it's all new. You're going to learn what you got to do on your new motorcycle. Okay. All right. So our main goal here is I probably want to get this tab hooked first here and then I'll concentrate on that one. So I got to his accessory wires are in the way we're going to cut them tuck them up out of the way. And now I can see my little clip that I got to get to. Not too bad. I got it latched around. I can feel it. Kind of look here. There's a little slot there that that kind of goes into. And then like I did earlier took my finger and pushed in on this tab here, Push down. Now this don't feel right. You know why? Because I've got this clip underneath the plastic tray. So I'm basically going to kind of pop it out of here again. Push in. Pull it up Get the battery strap out of the way. Get your little folding tab out of the way. The rear one's still hooked. Push this in. Let's see, what's holding us up. Take your time. Okay. so you saw what I did. I had the battery strap in the way and I had that metal tab in the way. So now there's my battery strap. Let's go ahead and clip that. There. Okay. Double-check we're hooked there. We're hook there in it's slot here. Got the tab on. Okay. Next up. We're going to retrieve the wheel speed sensor wire here. Kind of just fished that back through this way. I had it tucked back by the end of the swing arm. All right. Remember now it's got this little pathway. they want you to follow but, I'm just wondering loop it around that front one. I think what I'll do is take this wire harness and bring it back Plug it in. And then slip it into its slot here. Let's just see. Okay. So that, that will go in from front to back. All right. Now you can see get these. Wow. I can't get the wire out of the way here cause I need it. But this, this wire's got to get looped here. I've got it looped here. It's got to go back here and get looped. So it's kind of a, not the most desirable setup. There so this is in its little receptacle. The wire comes back loops around here, goes forward, loops around there. Now we've got our wire harness to deal with here. Pivot that around. You hear that little click now I know that's latched into place. We're basically ready here to put the negative cable back on We can do that because we still have the main fuse pulled Get this accessory lead up. All right. Kind of turns it into a little project just to tighten the battery bolts, but it's pretty important that you do it. If you think back, if you ever had to work on metric bikes in the eighties, well, even now they bury them on them things, but Harley really didn't have much of a choice of where to put the battery on this motorcycle Back the inch pounds here Now barely just fits in there. Okay. We're going to leave the battery strap kind of flapping in the breeze here. Cause it's right at the very end and when we're done with this whole procedure we've got to put that little plastic cover on. We've got to put the outer cover on and I can probably at this time just put the dipstick back in for now. Line up the pin there. Push it in Quarter turn. Okay. Well there it is. Yeah now I got a little access here. We'll throw a little dielectric grease on that negative post and pretty much have her done. There it is. Like I said, it's not as easy as your old motorcycle but, it's really not that bad. It just takes a little more time. You just gotta be patient slow down. Try not to break any plastic stuff. Okay. Let's keep rolling down the list.