Video: How Clutches Work on a Polaris ATV

Clutches and how they work--both the front clutch and the rear clutch--on Polaris ATV, including a Polaris 500 X2 quad are discussed by our expert ATV mechanic in this free ATV Maintenance and repair video.

Video Transcript

On behalf of Expert Village my name is Tom Roland we are at Cottonwood Motor Sports and I am here to tell you about doing a service on a Polaris Quad and this is a fairly representative of macho, many of them. On the Polaris, this is what you would find inside the cover. This is the front clutch that goes on the motor and this is the rear clutch that goes on the input on the final drive. This is called the driven clutch and this is called the drive clutch. On the Polaris as the motor speeds up, this first clutch, the weights, will counteract the spring and they push together. When they do, they push these pulley's and everything is going to fall apart. They push these pulley's together which makes the belt ride out farther which raises the gear ratio. When the motor slows down, it goes farther apart and that makes the belts go down in the pulley which makes the gear ratio a lot lower for stronger pulling. Conversely when that front one goes up, this one goes apart and that makes this pulley smaller in the back and when the motor slows down and the speed slows down, then the front pulley goes smaller and this goes larger to take up the slack. This is a pretty simple system in a lot of ways and it doesn't require a lot of maintenance, but it does need to be looked at periodically to make sure you clean the dirt out of it and to make sure there aren't any excessive worn parts. The pulley's are supposed to be real smooth. When they get a lot of wear on them, especially on the front, they will start to square off around here. They are supposed to be a nice smooth taper all the way from top to bottom and if they are not, they make the clutches so that they don't transition well from low range to high range.

How Clutches Work on a Polaris ATV

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