Right, problem solved!! I'll explain how I sorted mine in case it's useful to anyone else in future.
I got Ross-Tech VCDS through yesterday and used it today.
The instructions on the Ross-Tech website say that the car has to be 4 wheels in the air to start with, but unfortunately my S4 is so low that this really isn't an option so I put the Passenger side front up on the jack. I figured there was no real reason to have the wheels in the air, it's not as if the ABS pump was going to try to spin them!
I connected up a pressure bleeding kit with about 12-15psi and cracked open the inner bleed nipple.
With the ignition ON I went to the ABS control module (03) in VCDS, selected "General settings (04)" and was given the screen to run various scenarios, on my car group 2 was to bleed the system.
This is where it got slightly weird, on the Ross-Tech website it says to select the group and click "Go" whereas on my car simply selecting the group cycled the ABS pump and the Go button was greyed out, so you had to click "Down" and "Up" between groups 1 and 2 to activate the bleed. I don't think this is right, as it would make much more sense to pre-select the group and press Go, but either way it worked.
I didn't know whether the ABS cycle was going to actually pump the liquid through, or just open valves for the pressure bleed to push it through.
After the first couple of runs I noticed that the ABS pump pushed fluid through a lot more quickly than the pressure bleeder, and I was also worried that depending on where the ABS pump was in the system the pressure bleeder might actually be pushing against it, so I disconnected the bleeder.
I got very few bubbles out of the passenger front caliper, and although the pedal felt improved it still wasn't great, so I decided to do all four.
I connected the hose to the passenger rear and got a friend to cycle the ABS pump, this time we got a LOT of bubbles out, and must have cycled the ABS pump 20 or 30 times, each time with lots of really big bubbles before we got three consecutive cycles with no air.
Repeated the process for drivers side rear and this time cycled the pump 10 times (I wanted to make sure I didn't have a bubble travelling down the line and left in there) with no air at all.
Drivers side front got a few small bubbles and then three consecutive cycles with no air.
Put the car back down, road test, brakes are back to normal. They're not GREAT at the moment because the previous owner installed some cheap pads which I cooked a bit but the main thing is there's no air in the system.
So, in summary for anyone else trying this:
- Bleed the brakes with a pressure bleeder first, ELSA says PR, DR, PF, DF
- Ignition ON
- Connect Ross-Tech VCRS (VAG-COM)
- Disconnect pressure bleeder
- Select Control Module 03 (ABS) and select General Settings (04)
- Put catch pipe etc on first bleed nipple and open it
- Select appropiate group which says Bleed System (On mine it was group 2)
- Keep cycling the pump until all the air is out, I used 3 consecutive cycles with no air bubbles as an indication
- Repeat for all four corners
- Remember to keep topping up the reservoir as you can get quite a bit of fluid pushed through by the ABS pump.
As a side note when I first drove the car the ABS and ESP lights were on, and the red brake warning started beeping and flashing. I braked pretty hard and the ABS and brake warning switched off. I went home to reset the ESP light using VCDS but when I turned the ignition back on after I had got the laptop all set up it had gone off by itself.
Hopefully this little guide is useful to someone, I must say VCDS is the best £270 I've ever spent, not only did I save £230 for the Audi garage doing it for me, but it's there for all future occasions AND has all the other vast number of functions you get with VCDS AND I can charge other VAG owners £10 a time for a code-read, saving them a fortune on having it done at a dealer... I expect it to pay for itself in no time.
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