Caledonia Trailblazers

jonathanbelanger · Posted: Sat Mar 24, 2012 1:23 pm Post subject: All but two bolts....

Hi everyone,

OK, I rebuilt the entire engine, which was far easier than I thought it would be. This is the first time dis-assembly took far longer than assembly. Once I got a new set of block bolts, I had the entire engine rebuild and closed up and back into the snowmobile in about 2-3 hours.

So, now I have everything back together, except I have 2 bolts remaining. They were with a 3rd that is used for attaching the negative cable from the battery to the started motor. I think the other two are related to the positive (red) lead from the starter solenoid to the back of the starter. The problem is the there is only one potential place for the positive lead to connect and when I try and hand tighten one of the bolts it does not feel correct.

So if someone could help me figure out where these two bolts go and how they relate to the starter, I'd be done with the rebuilding. Just ad some fluids, get the fuel (first tank as a mix) and oil pumps along with the carburetors primed, it should be ready for a first crank.

I can see the finish line, I just can't figure out how to get there.

~Jon.

jonathanbelanger · Posted: Fri Apr 06, 2012 5:27 pm Post subject:

I had to take the engine back out. I was reading on another message board that if you installed the oil pump bleed kit, you may need to reshim the oil pump shaft to keep it within specs for end play. Well, with the shim that was already there, I needed up with 0.015" end play, and the maximum is 0.016", so I was within tolerances. I put everything back together and found that the two bolts I had were actually suppose to connect the starter motor bracket to the engine block and the ones I had doing this were actually suppose to be used to attached the engine cowling to the engine. I made the swap, and now there are not extra parts.

I put the engine back into the chassis, and hooked just about everything up. I looked all over the place and it looked like everything that had to be hooked up to be able to add oil was, so I filled the oil taks with 2-stroke engine oil. When I did not see any rising in the self-bleed tube, I looked around and found that the oil line from the oil tank to the pump had somehow come loose. I scrambled to minimize the oil spill, and ended up getting the oil line into the mouth of the 2-stroke oil container I was using. I then got some small vise grips and crimped the line closed. I then wiped off the line and put it back on the oil pump and made sure the clamp was properly set and seated. I uncrimped the line and let it sit. Within seconds oil was rising up the bleed tube back to the oil tank. Success. I topped the oil tank and let the whole thing sit for a few hours, to make sure there were no more leaks. I then went to the gas station and got a fresh 5 gallons of gas, some sta-bil for ethanol, and enough 2-stroke oil to mix with the gas for a 32-1 gas to oil ratio. I put the 5 gallons in the gas tank, added the sta-bil and the 2-stoke oil. I then pulled the pull start a couple of times to get gas into the newly relocated fuel pump. I pulled a couple of more times to get the gas into the carbs. I then turned the key to on, and made two pulls before it started and ran beautifully.

So now my snowmobile is back together. One of my concerns is that now that it is no longer a 544cc engine but a 559cc engine, this may aggravate the lean condition even more. So, prior to next season, I think I'll bring it into a Polaris dealer and have them richen them up a bit, one needle and jet size to compensate. Does this sound reasonable?

Thanks for reading this saga. So, now its fixed just in time for golf season. Laughing

~Jon.

jonathanbelanger · Posted: Sat Jan 12, 2013 4:51 pm Post subject:

OK, the engine makes the same noise when hot that I heard prior to the rebuild. I think the carbs need to be adjusted (made richer).

Today, I pulled the snowmobile from the lawn and into the garage. I want to make sure all the bolts are still tight and also take off the top end and get a look at the pistons. After driving the snowmobile into the garage, I decided to take a look at the spark plugs. I one had the engine running for about 5 minutes. They both have carbon build up, but that may be because I'm running a premix still. One thing I noticed though was while I had both spark plugs out, the one of the side with the failed piston had smoke coming out of it, while the other side did not. What would cause this? I'm starting to think that the 2 carbs are not set identically, or the one for the right (failed) piston is having issues. Any ideas about this would be helpful.

~Jon.

jonathanbelanger

As you can see from the table below, Polaris has changed a number of things and left others the same. The change in 2006 to the Needle Jet made the mid-range richer, but they went even leaner than 2005 in 2007 and 2008. I'm not sure what the difference between a -33 and -41 Jet Needle represents. The only other change is that the Main Jets changed, from being different from Mag to PTO side, but also richer to leaner.

There was also one other thing that changed, in 2008 a cold air kit was added to draw cold air directly form above the hood through the blower and over the engine, rather than taking the air just over the exhaust as it was in 2005-2007.