Remember this little fella?
Our ASV DX4350 shown here heading south back in late January. The first groomer I was ever trusted to run myself.
One of the ongoing issues with this machine has been starting. We thought we'd figured it when I installed synthetic oil a couple years ago. It still doesn't love starting in the cold but it'll do it. Until it wouldn't.
We got a big snow storm a couple weeks after the picture was taken. The machine was parked near the southern limit of our trail system and buddy Ben headed down to run it. Of course it wouldn't start, it'd just run to get down there, why would it start now?
Thus began the great heating. I wish I had pictures, they tarped it and shot a propane heater at it. They had a generator and heated the block but nothing.
I've had an idea for awhile now that there might be a problem with the shutoff solenoid in the injection pump. I'd had a similar problem with my '98 Jetta way back in 2014.
Unfortunately I couldn't figure out how to communicate this to Ben. He claimed to have tested it but I'm pretty sure he didn't or didn't do it correctly, which unfortunately led to this:
This is the starter from the ASV. Unfortunately I didn't get a before picture, its is after I "repaired" it. I'd call this a field expedient repair. That little screw you can see is holding the wire to the ring terminal which brings power from the starter solenoid into the starter. Ben had cranked on the starter so much he'd melted that wire clean off...
After wrestling with what to do I eventually ordered a new one. Its a DB Electrical unit, made in China. I didn't feel great about ordering it but it was less than half what a replacement from ASV would be and arrived in a couple days.
I didn't actually do the installation, fortunately the club has some real mechanics who had it installed in a jiffy. Honestly this starter sounds great and spins the engine faster than the old one. I think that ongoing starting issues had seriously wounded the previous starter.
So on to the issue that got us here in the first place. On the injection pump itself is a little magnetic solenoid that shuts off fuel. For some reason power is not going from the key to the solenoid. As a field expedient fix we ran a wire directly from the battery to the solenoid and the engine fired right up.
I groomed the machine back from the southern end of our trail system to the north with that field fix and everything was great. On a later run something happened and caused the fuse we'd put on that wire to pop.
This is why you use fuses folks, if that dead short had caused a fire back in the woods it'd have been bad. Eventually we determined that the short was in the original wiring from the key to the solenoid. We worked around it by just eliminating that wire. So now the only thing connected to the solenoid is my fused jumper wire. The machine made 2 more runs like that.
Long term the ASV needs to come back to my house. I'm going to run a new wire from the key switch to the solenoid. I want to restore the ability to shut the machine off from the cab. The wiring in the ASV is a bit of a disaster so I'll take some time to clean that up too.
More to come...
