Ask the Editors: Make My Quad Wheelie Happy
My ratios need tweaking.
Dear ATVC: I love to ride wheelies and I just got a Can-Am DS650. My first and second gear are so low I can’t even pick the front end up but it goes really fast in top gear. Right now I have 40 teeth in the rear and 15 in the front. What can I do to fix this problem please?
You have done a good job of isolating the problem – your machine is geared too low for what you are looking to do with it; or another way of saying it – the current gear ratio is designed less for low and mid range torque and instead for top speed.
The fix, fortunately, is an easy one. You want to gear the machine up and you can accomplish this by either putting a sprocket with less teeth on the rear or more on the countershaft. Some combination of the two can also work but that would be overkill in this case.
You could increase the teeth on the countershaft (front sprocket) by 1 or even 2 and likely change the power delivery to where you want it. You can also drop the number of teeth on the rear sprocket for more fine-tuning of the ratio that doesn’t require you to access the trickier countershaft.
Since each change to the front sprocket is roughly 3 teeth in the rear, you can decrease the 40-tooth you’re currently running to something like a 35 or 36-tooth, which will be more pronounced than adding 1 tooth to the front but not quite as extreme as adding 2.
As always in these cases, experiment until you find the exact ratio that works for you. Click here to read a thorough explanation of gear ratios.