
One thing that the instructions didn't mention, that should have been included, was the need to remove the center bolt when removing the primary and secondary clutches. Sure that's obvious, but it wasn't in the instructions, and someone not familiar with clutch replacement could have gotten confused. It would also have been handy if they explained the disassembly and assembly of the secondary clutch more thoroughly. Overall, the instructions were good and installation wasn't difficult. If this is your first time working with clutches, set aside a few hours and make sure you do everything right and don't get frustrated. Wrench-handy people won't have any problems. Having a friend to help makes things easier, especially if he's done it before and you haven't!
Ride Review We immediately noticed that the clutch engages at a higher RPM--you have to give a little more throttle before the clutch engages. The only time you will notice that the clutch isn't engaging at a low RPM is when you are slowly rolling on the throttle from a dead stop. There's good reasoning for the high-RPM clutch engagement. With this set-up you have more power when the clutch engages, similar to releasing the clutch at a higher RPM on a manual shift machine. We could also feel faster back shifting, although it wasn't a whole lot more than stock.

With the stock setup, the clutch doesn't engage right off idle, but it was still pretty low. At the same point that the clutch engages during take off, is the same point that it disengages when you are slowing down, which results in free wheeling. With the higher engagement this also means it free-wheels sooner. But just like the stock setup, blip the throttle for it to engage again so that you have engine braking. After the clutch kit was installed, it did feel like it had a little more engine braking than before until you got down to about 5 mph. The only place we found that the higher engagement hurt was when we were rock crawling. It could still crawl rocks, and the higher engagement didn't make it any more difficult to control the power, but its always nice to have power right off idle for smoother power delivery.
After installing the clutch kit from Hot Seat, the Scrambler would lift the front end a little easier than stock and the better power delivery helped keep it up a little longer too. However, when casually trail riding, you won't really notice a big difference compared to stock. Once you pick the pace up, the Hypershift kit really starts to show its stuff. With the stock setup, the RPM's jump up high and you would start to accelerate pretty fast when you would hit a straightaway and go to full throttle. Under the same circumstances with the clutch kit installed, the RPM's don't go up as high at first, and you get a real powerful pull from the midrange you didn't feel before. It felt a little hesitant to go up into the high RPM's as fast as it did previously in the same straightaway we used for the timed run comparisons (see below). At 200 yards we weren't hitting top speed anyway. When we took it out to longer runs, the results were similar, yet still different. Even though it felt hesitant, our speedometer showed we were going faster than we were with the stock set up. The low end also showed improvement with the kit, as did the midrange. We discovered a lot of power hidden in the midrange that we didn't find with the stock setup, due to it revving up to the higher RPM's so quickly on the straightaway. Obviously Hot Seat set up the clutch kit for this model to get better use of the mid range. There were good gains in power being transferred to the rear wheels but it still wasn't a huge difference from stock. If you immediately switched between a Scrambler with the clutch kit and a stock one, you would feel a difference, but it wouldn't be night and day.

To get an idea of the performance differences between the stock Scrambler and after the clutch kit was installed, we took some time measurements of before and after installation. We recorded the times in both 2wd and 4wd. Keep in mind that if you were to take these measurements yourself, the altitude, weather conditions, and type of terrain you are riding on could make the times vary.