My brother has a 4 year old Kodiak, one of those special edition ones. One of our favorite things to do is to ride the trails at night under a full moon when we camp with our families in northern Minnesota. While riding the Spider lake trails at about midnight I stopped and noticed my bro wasn't behind me anymore so I backtracked on the logging road and found him in a sour mood. He was trying to re-attatch his front left wheel! Our mother, wives, and kids would have had blisters on their ears. I parked my wheeler to shine the lights on the work in progress.

I was tiring of holding up the front of his wheeler, which required both hands, and I desperately needed at least one hand to swat mosquitos, and my bro still hadn't diagnosed the problem. He is not the most mechanically inclined. We switched places and for the first time I got a look at the workings of a Yamaha wheeler.

The lower ball joint had come out of the A-arm, somehow the screw that tightens the ball loint to the lower A-arm was stripped. When he had hit a bump the wheel no longer acted in concert with the other three and tried to go it's own way. Only the screw was stripped, not the female threads.

As I put the shaft back into the wheel hub and tried to re-align everything I noticed the inboard and outboard CV boots were in shreads. I asked him how long they had been that way. He spat out a few dozen mosquitos and replied they had first ripped last fall, and as someone who does his own maintanance he just hadn't gotten to it yet. I peered into his front diff with the flashlight and the fluid in there looked more like a sandy milk shake than oil. The joints themselves looked worse. He had been riding like this in all kinds of mud and sandy mucky water for more than 9 months!

We ended up abandoning the Kodiak until morning and fewer mosquitos. We went to a hardware store and got a new bolt and had it running in just a few minutes. Despite the severe abuse it still seemed to work just fine. I have never seen anyone who mercilessly flogs a wheeler like my bro. This was three months ago and he still hasn't fixed the boots.[img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-disgusted.gif[/img]

This coming summer I am buying a new wheeler for my teenagers.... a Kodiak450.

 

WOW that's all i can think of. WOW

 

had he crashed and gotten hurt he probably would have blamed yamaha!

 

When I bought my warrior it had no air boot betweent he carb and air box. The tires were on backwards, only 2 bolts held on the rear sproket, and the swingarm bolt was full of mess. Not to mention the oil filter looked as though it had never been cleaned. Another year or two and it would have been clogged. He was running it on car oil too. Thick black stuff because he thought the rod was knocking and he didnt want me to hear it. People treat their quads like crap. Yamahas get torn up but still keep ticking, hondas dont get torn up so easy but when they do they stop because honda over engineers everything and undoes their own reliability.

I am helping bandit put in a new head gasket on his 440ex. Have to remove a head cover, drain the oil, then remove the camshaft. Then you can actually get to the head bolts (2 are under the cam shaft). Then they arent even bolts, they are studs. At first we were just going to retorque them but since its this much friggen trouble just to get to them were replacing the headgasket too.