Russ Williams

Hey Rwoody, Glad to hear your finding a happy place for your collection of 425's. I didn't really get the satisfaction out of my return trip to my Polaris factory wrench I would have liked, he told me he replaced the cam & compression release but it still often does not want to roll over like it should, but I'm done with the guy. I think he just replaced the cam cover & left the comp release out. Occasionally when it rolls up and doesn't want to roll over I just give a yank on the pull starter and it starts right up. Never got on readjusting my carb and still am still missing like 15% of the top end. Having a new ride for the majority of my tasks moves working on the Mag down my list of things to do. Kept it around cuz I know I wouldn't get much for it and it is serviceable. With the recent "Snowmageddon" descending on Michigan I remounted her with the OEM plow I had always used and would not have even known there was any power problem. Had everything cleared in short order. Very glad I kept her around. Don't like having a plow on my machine when I go to the woods for firewood. I have got kinda spoiled on the power steering on my new ride also. Here's a vid on what I did with my new ride today. edited.mp4

Hey Woody, Don't know how my previous post ended on here again, but whatever... Glad to hear you had some recent success. These older machines, especially the 325 & 425 Magnums are very complicated and finicky to say the least. Great when they are new or not acting up but can be a major pain when they want to be. I can't really complain my machine gave me 19 very good years, often overloaded or abused, like the time my son took a telephone pole on at about 30 miles an hour (the pole won) which led to it being totaled as far as the insurance company was concerned because the dealership that gave the estimate found the mounting ears for the A frames on the left hand side were bent and they could not straighten them due to liability reasons so they would of had to replace the whole frame. Insurance Co paid me out and allowed me to by it back for not much & I straightened them out and put bout $400 in parts back into it & I was good to go for many years. So this last weekend I wanted to put a few miles on & try to decide if I wanted to mess with getting the last 10% of performance out of it that I still think is missing. Took a leisurely ride out to our woods, shut it off and cleared a few branches from some of the trails that had fallen over the winter and then got back onto start it up to cover a little more of the woods. Struck me as kinda odd that when I hit the start button it rolled up & stopped??? Never had done that before & has a new well charged battery. Anyhow the second time I hit the starter it rolled over and fired up & I was off. A couple of hundred yards across the woods I heard a bit of pulsing/hissing sound & thought I picked up a stick that was dragging. Stopped & looked down on my left side & there was fluid gushing out of the engine compartment onto my boot. GREAT. Quick shut it off & got off to investigate. Thought it was coolant but quickly found it was oil!!! Good thing I stopped quick. Walked the 1/2 mile back to the house, got my wife, tow strap & my 570 & drug it back home. What I have since learned is there is a compression release pin that is in the cam that holds the ex valve open to provide for easier starting. Well it somehow dislodged and went through the camshaft end cap. So I'm tits up again. Fortunately my wrench apologized over and over & even offered to come & get the machine & take care of it, So it's going to get taken care of. He said he has done many cams on these Polaris's & never seen one come apart like that. The kinda good thing about these machines is there is a ton of parts available on EBAY for them. I've started to wonder if that is where mine will end up.

Hey Rwoody, I have been through all of the frustrations you have mentioned. My 98 425 magnum went bad on me just over a year ago. While hauling a very heavy load of wood out and through the field it seemed as though there just wasn't the power there should have been. Usually it would practically bury my trailer with thrown mud but this time I made it out without much spinning, matted all the way home. Over the next few weeks it continued to decline till it got to the point to be nearly unusable, no power, backfiring, blown engine oil smell etc. I'll try and keep this short but... Anyhow I replaced the carb with a $40 special cuz the needle & seat were shot/leaking & the rebuild kit cost nearly the same as the carb. No help. Replaced diaphragm pump cuz it was easy & cheap. No help. Replaced coil with a $10 Ebay deal. Nothing changed. Metered all test points OK. I was not yet retired during that time and just did not want to take on replacing the cam which much of my research led me to. So I parked it and took the advice of the Mrs and bought a new 570 Sportsman Utility Edition. Problem solved temporarily. Within the last couple of months I got the bug to start poking away at it again and through some friends I ended up put in touch with a retired good factory trained Polaris technician that gave me a reasonable price and a 4 or 5 day turnaround to replace the cam so I loaded it up and 5 days later had the machine back with the new cam. I did run much better and would rev if I accelerated slowly but it seemed to flatten out at around 60% power. Also if I punched it off just above idle it would bog, spit, sputter and just basically tell me it ain't happening. So now what? With all the thing I had done I thought I had introduced another problem. I decided to first focus on the carb, checked the float level & raised the needle from the middle notch to the bottom. Seemed to help a little but not much. Got & installed a new air cleaner (without the foam outer cover), replaced the broken air cleaner hold down bracket & installed a new spark plug. No change. Are we having fun yet? SO getting tired of taking the tank and all associated parts off to get to what I was wrenching on I decided to temporarily mount the tank to the front rack with bungee cords and tie down straps. This allowed me to tinker without having to do so much BS to get to the goodies. Well with no seat, except for a boat cushion and the tank mounted to the front rack I started making test rides and forcing it into failure mode. Riding slowly, punching it and trying to reason out what was wrong. Apply the choke did not seem to make any difference. On one test ride after punching it and getting the bogg & slight blowback through the air cleaner inlet tube I put my left hand over the tube to try and prove whether it was a fuel/air issue or electrical and BAM it takes off like a raped ape. Take my hand off the inlet and it would nearly die, back on & we're off to the races. Deciding that I didn't want to ride with my left hand on the inlet, the same inlet that had not had the prefilter on for years, I made up a pre filter out of some filter material I had and installed it over the intake. This somewhat solved the problem but it would blubber from an obviously rich mixture because the prefilter I had made was being to restrictive. My next attempt at a permanent repair was to place the oil bath outer filter back on the air filter and to make a less restrictive prefilter over the intake with a spacer in the intake made of a coat hanger (much like the OEM part) to keep the prefilter from being sucked into the intake and my machine runs like it should. So my last problem was definitely fuel/air. I had seen one post somewhere in the last year about the need for the prefilter having to be on the intake but kind of discarded it as I had run mine for years without the prefilter on. It seems to me like there needs to be a certain amount of restriction on the intake for the carb to work properly. Hope this helps you and anyone else that has had these problems.

Hey Rwoody, I have been through all of the frustrations you have mentioned. My 98 425 magnum went bad on me just over a year ago. While hauling a very heavy load of wood out and through the field it seemed as though there just wasn't the power there should have been. Usually it would practically bury my trailer with thrown mud but this time I made it out without much spinning, matted all the way home. Over the next few weeks it continued to decline till it got to the point to be nearly unusable, no power, backfiring, blown engine oil smell etc. I'll try and keep this short but... Anyhow I replaced the carb with a $40 special cuz the needle & seat were shot/leaking & the rebuild kit cost nearly the same as the carb. No help. Replaced diaphragm pump cuz it was easy & cheap. No help. Replaced coil with a $10 Ebay deal. Nothing changed. Metered all test points OK. I was not yet retired during that time and just did not want to take on replacing the cam which much of my research led me to. So I parked it and took the advice of the Mrs and bought a new 570 Sportsman Utility Edition. Problem solved temporarily. Within the last couple of months I got the bug to start poking away at it again and through some friends I ended up put in touch with a retired good factory trained Polaris technician that gave me a reasonable price and a 4 or 5 day turnaround to replace the cam so I loaded it up and 5 days later had the machine back with the new cam. I did run much better and would rev if I accelerated slowly but it seemed to flatten out at around 60% power. Also if I punched it off just above idle it would bog, spit, sputter and just basically tell me it ain't happening. So now what? With all the thing I had done I thought I had introduced another problem. I decided to first focus on the carb, checked the float level & raised the needle from the middle notch to the bottom. Seemed to help a little but not much. Got & installed a new air cleaner (without the foam outer cover), replaced the broken air cleaner hold down bracket & installed a new spark plug. No change. Are we having fun yet? SO getting tired of taking the tank and all associated parts off to get to what I was wrenching on I decided to temporarily mount the tank to the front rack with bungee cords and tie down straps. This allowed me to tinker without having to do so much BS to get to the goodies. Well with no seat, except for a boat cushion and the tank mounted to the front rack I started making test rides and forcing it into failure mode. Riding slowly, punching it and trying to reason out what was wrong. Apply the choke did not seem to make any difference. On one test ride after punching it and getting the bogg & slight blowback through the air cleaner inlet tube I put my left hand over the tube to try and prove whether it was a fuel/air issue or electrical and BAM it takes off like a raped ape. Take my hand off the inlet and it would nearly die, back on & we're off to the races. Deciding that I didn't want to ride with my left hand on the inlet, the same inlet that had not had the prefilter on for years, I made up a pre filter out of some filter material I had and installed it over the intake. This somewhat solved the problem but it would blubber from an obviously rich mixture because the prefilter I had made was being to restrictive. My next attempt at a permanent repair was to place the oil bath outer filter back on the air filter and to make a less restrictive prefilter over the intake with a spacer in the intake made of a coat hanger (much like the OEM part) to keep the prefilter from being sucked into the intake and my machine runs like it should. So my last problem was definitely fuel/air. I had seen one post somewhere in the last year about the need for the prefilter having to be on the intake but kind of discarded it as I had run mine for years without the prefilter on. It seems to me like there needs to be a certain amount of restriction on the intake for the carb to work properly. Hope this helps you and anyone else that has had these problems.