O.K. After surfing through many of the atv forums and hearing all the complaining
about how heavy the Polaris sportmans are, I just had to respond. There is no question
that the ride quality of these machines are the best. And there is a reason for that.It's
called PHYSICS. The physics of mass in motion. It's hard to explain, but to I'll try to keep it
simple. Lets say that my machine weighs 715# and I and my gear and gas weigh 250#
that totals to 965#. So your travling down a trail at 20 mph and go over a tree root sticking
out of the ground. (still with me) What is going to happen is the wheel is going to want to
move upward to go over the root, at the same time the coil spring is going to compress
so that the machine doesn't move upward the distance the Wheel does.(simple I know)
But here is where things get tricky, there are two things that determine how much the
coil spring compresses, one the stiffness of the coil itself, and two the amount of weight
that the coil spring has to fight against to keep from moving upwards. A soft coil would
accomplish this, but not carry any amount of extra weigh. So a heavy machine with a stiffer
coil is going to ride the same is a lite machine with a softer coil, and still be able to carry
extra weight.
I hope this helps to better understand why Polaris has the best ride.[img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-smile.gif[/img]