A bit like pep and his slide hammer on the cpu, hit it with a bigger hammer!
So my RZR has always been not the smoothest starting machine. We thought it had dropped a commutator bar in the starter but due to the contortionist act needed to change a starter in a RZR we had been ignoring it. It has been getting harder and harder to start so we finally bit the bullet and decided to fix it. We got the one of the Polaris dealer mechanics in our club to have a listen and he diagnosed it as the starter sprag clutch. Another club member, who wrecks atvs and UTVs supplied a secondhand sprag and starter gear. Unfortunately they were not much better than what was in it. The new replacement parts arrived today and as I'm flat out at work and Jason is only working part time at the moment, he put them in for me.
Old sprag (with flat spots) and starter gear.
He rang me at 3pm to say it was in but it was still kicking back when he tried to start it and he thought it had jumped a, or several, teeth on the cam chain and the timing was out. He needed me to look up the service manual for my (non-turbo) RXR because he only had the turbo RXR one. To find TDC you pull the crack angle sensor out and look down the hole until certain marks appear. Typically, the marks are different between the turbo and non-turbo version. I gave him the marks and he confirmed the cams were out by two teeth. At this stage I decided that I really should go and have a look, so after the webinar on tactile pavers for blind and vision impaired pedestrians that I was listening to when he rang finished I knocked off work and headed up to the workshop.
I got there to find that it was all back together and it only needs a new cam chain tensioner that should be here on Friday. That is well designed and is replaceable by undoing two bolts pulling the old one out, putting the new one in and doing the bolts back up. Because we are going on a trail ride on Sunday with 60km laps I had left him a new belt to put on.
After telling me the starter and cam timing is now fine, he announces the primary clutch has a big crack in it!
The RZR has CVT transmission and runs a rubber belt. The primary clutch looks like this.
Once you take the top plate off you have to unscrew the three leg spider that is loctite on using a tool that looks like this.
Except Jason's one is home made out of scrap steel and has a handle sticking out the side you can put a 5' cheater bar on. After fighting with it for ten minutes we realised, because of the big crack, the steel centre shaft was turning in the sheeve and not coming undone.
This is the cool tool that clamps in the vice and the cooling fins on the bottom of the sheeve engage in to hold it while you haul on it to break the loctite.
At this point many swear words were said and head scratching went on until I suggested that as it was already cracked and not reusable just hit it and break the aluminium sheeve off so we could hold it in the vice. It took surprisingly little effort to break the sheeve off. Even with the centre shaft belt directly in the vice it still turned under the efforts of the 5' cheater so we resorted to welding it to a piece of box section.
This did the trick and with an almost cartoon like pop and stumble as it let go we got it undone.
It took about five minutes to reassemble it using parts from my spare clutch and another five minutes to put it back in the RZR. I've never seen one crack like that before.
