[dave_dj1]

as most of you know, i've been fighting with my 96 xlt, after much thought and several sleepless nights, and several readings of various web pages, on the pipes and what have you , i realizes i was suffering from a lean condition on low rpm's , one little sentance finaly hit me, "in an untouched airbox" well, someone had already gutted the airbox, so i went to my local Polaris dealer first thing this morning, got me some .040 and .045 pilot jets,(stodk are .035), ripped those carbs out again!!(i can do them blindfoled now) and blew everythign out just to be sure, put the .040's in and man what a difference! after she warms up good, i have much better low end response! i almost wish i had put the .045's in now, i'm going to try them at a later date. i'll keep you all posted. just thought i would pass this info along as a lot of people seem to be having simaler problems. my theory is this; as the carbs get older, maybe just friction from the fuel and air passing through the ports widens them, changing the whole tuning cpability of the carb. who knows? lol just seems odd to me that this problem can occur out of the blue on machines that have been running fine and then all of a sudden aquire this symptom!
Happy Riding!
p.s.
i took her out for a test drive this afternoon, had to baby her because of the fresh rebuild lastnite but, what a difference, getting hrr all tuned the way she should be.

 

[RotaxAtax]

my guess would be a vaccum point somewhere on the sled suddenly changed. Weather it be airbox, crank seal, exhaust. Thats the only thing that i can think of so suddenly. If by chance i'm right, i'd be very carefull running that thing WOT down the lake the first few times.

 

[dave_dj1]

well, it all started a couple of weeks back, i had contaminated fuel(this suddenly came back into memory yesterday morning)and the sled just quit, in a field, i checked the plugs and the right cylinder looked pretty ash white colored, i thawed it out in the garage, put in fresh gas and it has run pretty well every since, till the other day , i just bought the sled on superbowl sunday and it always idled high, about 4,000 so i assume that was the previous mechanics way of getting around the lean condition at the time, he also put the slp pipes on it , re-jetted it, put in a water pump, head gasket etc.
my guess is , when they piped it, they gutted the air box which slp says not to touch, so they lost the vacume at low rpm's, they simply turned the idle up to 4k to bypass the pilot jet.
if a crank seal is bad on the mag side, how would you tell?
from what i gather here, the clutch side you can spray some wd-40 or starting fluid on to test, the vacume will seal up momentarily?
i know i have to run her conservatively for a while anyway, and i will check the plugs frequently, i jetted her kind of on the lean side for the warmer days, if i ride and it goes below +10 i'll rejet back to the 280's, i'm running 270's now, seems to be awesome!