How to Do a Maintenance Check on the Radiator of a Polaris ATV

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village my name is Tom Roland and we're at Cottonwood Motor Sports and I'm here to tell you about doing service on a Polaris Quad and this is fairly representative of many of them. The radiator on a Polaris on the units with a box on the front have a, the radiator cap is underneath the front and it's underneath this inspection cover here. The radiator cap, you want to take the cap off when the motor's cool. You don't ever want to do it when it's hot. You take the radiator cap off and inspect the fluid and it should be nice and clean and it shouldn't be dirty looking or anything or on units with higher mileage, on a hundred hour service, they need to have the coolant changed on them. You also want to check for leaks at the water pump and all the hoses to make sure that you're not losing any water any way. If the radiator is full all the way to the bottom of the cap and the inside of the cap looks like it's doing its job and all the rubber parts are in good shape then you're probably all right. You can probably just carefully wipe it off and then put it back on again. On units that have more time on them the radiator caps actually degrade over time and they don't hold their pressure as good as they are suppose to. And one common complaint is that people say that the bike's over heating and it's losing water and it's not actually over heating it's just that the cap doesn't have that ability to hold the pressure in that it's suppose to at the normal operating temperatures. Also, one other thing on this particular model, the access plug to hook up the computer to diagnose fuel injection issues is underneath this cover also. So, to diagnose those you would go under this cover to plug in our computer. I'll talk a little bit about that a little later. But, in relationship to the coolant, any water that gets past this cap, goes down this clear hose here and then goes to the coolant reservoir and as water gets hot it expands, it doesn't compress, it just expands and it's normal for water to expand out of this tank due to expansion and it goes into the expansion tank and I'll point that out in a minute but as a motor cools down and as the radiator cools down the water contracts and it's suppose to go, the cap allows the water to go back to the radiator, back into the radiator so that it fills it back up again. So, this is always suppose to be filled all the way to the top. On units without an expansion tank the water would always appear a little low because it'll always push some water out. But, on these they're suppose to be always full to the top and the expansion tank isn't suppose to have any leaks and it's checked when it's hot and when it's cold. There's lines on it usually that says this is the level when it's hot and this is the level when it's cold and we'll point that out now."