New snow and the taste of failure

This month's "Storm of the Century" is upon us, 10-12" of snow overnight into tomorrow. I'm glad I got the Pantera out already.

So I decided it was finally time to deal with the Cobra which if you remember seemed to have iffy spark last year. Tonight I pulled the exhaust and recoil and cleaned the points. Interestingly there seemed to be a coating of black crap on them. I cleaned and cleaned.

For cleaning I turn the flywheel until one set of points is open, then I shoot some Caig Deoxit into the gap, then spin to the other side and repeat. I bought some 100% Deoxit in the hope it would do an even better job than the already excellent regular Deoxit which is only like 20%. They sell lower strength formulations to be safe on sensitive electronics. Points really aren't all that sensitive so the 100% stuff seems the way to go here.

After they sit for a minute and the Deoxit softens whatever crud is in there I flip the flywheel until the points are closed, then open them with a screwdriver and stick in a piece of cardstock. In this case I'm using cut up strips of business card.

Yank on the strip and it pulls crud off the points. Flip it around, open the points and repeat. Snip off the dirty part and repeat, then throw it away, get a new strip and repeat. And repeat, and repeat.

Reassembled and tried to fire it up. It'll go and sometimes even fire on both sides but not reliably. The mag side is firing 100% while the PTO side is recalcitrant. I need to look up which set of points controls which plug as I can't remember. I'd guess the rear since it was dirtier.

Anyway I took it all apart again and this time even pulled the flywheel. Thats when I found a little oil below the stator plate. I think the reason the points are so dirty is that the crank seal on this side has been leaking and allowing the gas/oil mix from this side to get out a little. That might explain why the points are so dirty after a relatively short amount of running.

So it looks like I need to do crank seals. I've actually never done them before on anything other than the old single cylinder Rotax in the Ski-Doo 12/3. It'll be an adventure.

Tomorrow I'll give the old Wankel Panther a shot. I probably should have tried it today instead of the Polaris. Last time I tried to revive the Panther it had the same spark trouble but responded very positively to cleaning. Hopefully this year it'll just go, I hate working outside in the snow.