dude theres 21 pages in this thread currently!!!!

 

I rock crawl with mine. Never hauled anything, other than my bag, tent, chair and a cooler. The only trees I've moved, I winched out of the way, so I could keep going.

 

wildnorthern,
have you ever tried an Arctic Cat??? It takes just a minute to stiffen up the suspension... and you can pull all your trailers, triees or friends bikes back to civilization. lol

 

I own a 04 grizzly and love it but if I was to purchase a 05 Id be looking at the all new kawasaki 750. alot of nice things in this new breed and kawasakis reputation of speed.

 

For farm and actual utility work the prairie 700 can't be beat.

 

Yeh, I just looked at it. Puget Sound/Seattle thread. 458 pages, 9153 posts and 29628 views and going strong! Must be some kind of a record. [img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-shocked.gif[/img]

 

Hate to tell you, but look on the engine, it dont say made in america, it says made in japan, at least the older ones do.

 

But nowdays, there is very little that can be 100% american made. For example, my dodge truck has parts from mexico. And my friends chevy has parts from south america. We would like to think that everything we buy is all american, but we are now so mixed in international trading, that it is hard for us to be competetive, unless we buy and sell overseas. My kawasaki 700 was all made here and even designed here. But the company is from Japan, so go figure. America has american companies in other countries and now we have other countries companies right here in america. So, with that said, the best one can say is their quad is more american than foregin or more foregin than american, but very few are 100% all american any more.[img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-sad.gif[/img]

 

Okay, let's keep it up. I use a Cat 500i on my farm, almost purely for utility farm purposes. It's the best utility quad I could find, for what I needed, because...

Manual transmission. I haul lots of heavy loads. Never burned a belt out, never will. And engine braking is unsurpassed. Put it in 1st low, and it just crawls down.

Torquey engine. Not a speed demon, but man what grunt it has.

Hi/lo for reverse. I hated the Cat's hi/lo shifter until someone pointed out that it worked for reverse as well. More than once, that lo reverse has come in handy.

Ground clearance. My farm is pretty rough, I was forever getting my Big Bear hung up on rocks. I've high centered the Cat once, on a big limestone rock hidden in a creek.

Simplicity. No electronics to speak of, even 4wd is a manual shift lever. I bought this thing to work, not to play video games on.

It has worked well. 1k miles in two years, and the the only failures were a fouled spark plug and a broken headlight bulb. I just love getting on the big Cat, it exudes confidence. You just know you're going to get there.

And to dispel a myth about IRS, from personal experience...

It squats only if you load the rear rack up, and my Cat will take quite a load before that becomes evident. If you are using a quad to haul heavy loads (200+ pounds), piling the load on the racks is not a good idea. You make the quad top heavy, and that can lead to any number of dangerous situations, aside from placing a greater strain on your suspension. Put the stuff on a trailer and pull that. IRS does not squat with a heavy trailer if you have loaded it correctly. A properly loaded trailer should have almost no tongue weight - the load balanced over the axle or axles. Pile too much weight on the tongue, and it'll squat, but if you're doing that, you need to repack your trailer before you have an accident, IRS or live axle. I routinely haul trailers full of cut hardwood: 400 to 500 pounds, with no squat, and no sagging, because I load the trailer properly.

True, if you use it on mostly flat land, live axle is less expensive, and cheaper to maintain. But if you're like me and live on rough ground, load hauling ability should not deter you from getting IRS.

 

somebody please correct me if im wrong but I could swear that the date on the very first post is over a year old.[img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-shocked.gif[/img] I think that might be the longest time a post has been active on hear that doesn’t have a huge time gap in between posts.