2025 was not our best year

 

You might remember my '78 Polaris Cobra, pictured here back in hapier times. Today the dang thing won't run because its got no spark on the MAG side. Generally I could get spark back if I cleaned the points some. Well this year that isn't working. So I figured it was finally time to throw some parts at the issue, so far I've replaced the external coils which didn't help at all. I bought, but have yet to install, new plug wires. Since this is a points machine the wires need to be copper core, not the new fangled graphite type. 

I think the real fix will be to replace the actual ignition power coil inside the mag. I got frustrated when snow was on the ground and just parked it up. I think I'm going to haul the machine to Maine and swap it with the old '70 Ski-Doo, that needs some welding on the frame and a gas tank clean but the repairs required are straight forward.

This is actually a more pressing concern. Adam and I took the ASV out to groom, this was back in mid February. We were just about as far south as we'd need to go when Adam commented that the machine felt down on power. Pretty soon we found that while the machine would go forward it wouldn't turn right.

We farted around with it on the side of the trail for a little bit but didn't find anything so we parked it up and walked out. It was nearly a mile out. Adam brings a backpack with nine thousand pounds of tools with him and as he was still recovering from surgery I got to lug that out.

The following weekend we went back with the Tucker and dragged it most of the way out to the road.

Turns out the machine can go straight ahead fine and turn left fine but can't turn right at all. This is good because the Tucker doesn't have enough power/traction to pull the whole combination up hill at all. So as we were hauling we'd start slowing down as Adam carefully adjusted the steering wheel to find the magic point where the machine would only go forward without trying to steer. The steering on this has always been sensitive and that didn't help. 

Overall I call this recovery a win, it worked way better than I'd expected.

Another weekend and we dragged the machine the rest of the way out and got it on the trailer. This was especially frightening because the trail looped around to the right so I ended up driving up on to the trailer and just hoping it was straight enough. Most of the trip onto the trailer I couldn't see anything but the plow and sky...

Now it sits in Ben's driveway where we've made a couple interesting discoveries. Mostly that it always turns left, forward or back. This means you can go anywhere you want but you need to do it as a series of left turns. Interestingly this tells me that both drive motors work correctly, to turn left going forward the right drive motor pushes forward. To turn left going backward the left drive motor pushes backward.

The left drive motor won't push forward and the right drive motor won't push backward.

Digging into it more we exposed the pump section of the system which, the manual says, has oil pickups for the pumps that feed the drive motors. The pickups are supposedly covered with screens so right now our best bet is to clean those screens. Unfortunately the screens are underneath 35 gallons of hydraulic oil...