Hello, John Talley here with partzilla.com. Today we're going to show you the procedure
to replace the belt on our 2011 Polaris Sportsman 850. It's not really that tough, all we have
to do is remove the tire, take out part of that frame brace, and then remove the rear
cover. That'll give us access to the belt itself.
So let me get this thing in the air, get the tire pulled off, and I'll show you how to
get it done. Alright guys, I've got it up in the air and
I've got our tire off. What we need to do is remove these four bolts that release this
frame section. After that, we go in and remove all these 10mm that are holding the actual
outer cover on. Once we get that pulled off you'll see the
sheaves as well as the drive belt. And hopefully, you haven't lost this little
special tool that'll be used to open up the sheave on the clutch and that will allow us
to get the belt off. So let's start pulling some bolts.
Alright guys, we've got the cover off and now we need to release the tension on this
pulley right here or the driven sheave. What you basically have right there is this collapsed
all the way down onto the belt. What we want to do is remove that bolt right there, or
at least loosen it, that way it will release and that way we can walk the belt off of there.
There's basically another way to do it, which I don't particularly like. You have this special
tool that came with the machine and you put it in there, and then push down on it and
that relieves tension on it. But that gets a little bit awkward to work with.
So what I prefer to do is use the same tool, go ahead and insert it there, use it to hold
that sheave still, and then loosen up that 15mm bolt. So let's get that thing loosened
up. If you choose to do it this way, you want
to make sure when you go to put the other belt back on that it's up high in the sheave
by rotating it counter-clockwise a couple of times where it's not binding down on it,
because you're going to want to get 37 ft-lbs. of torque on this bolt and if it's bearing
down on the belt it's going to give you a false reading.
Alright, also want to notice the direction of the belt. See those arrows going around
in a clockwise direction. So we want to make sure that we put on the new belt in the same
direction. Looking at this belt, it wasn't in that bad
a shape. A little bit of wear on it, nothing that severe. What you would want to look for
is if it got caught and then just burned up a little section of it, that would make the
machine respond really jerky when you would try to engage the sheaves.
You want to check the surface area of the sheaves as well. What you're looking for on
the surface area of the sheaves is you just want it to be nice and smooth without any
real drastic grooves cut anywhere on either side of it. As you can tell, this new one
has a nice fluid feel to it. You can't really feel that one because of course it has the
spring inserted inside of it. Actually, she looks to be in pretty good shape.
I don't see anything clinking around and it actually sounded pretty good before we pulled
it apart. Both the driven and the drive sheaves look
good so I think we can just get another belt on there and keep moving along.
Alright, the Polaris belt doesn't have a set of arrows on it, this was evidently an aftermarket
one that somebody had put on there. But what you want to note is the "Polaris," make sure
it is facing towards you like this and that will be the direction you want to put it back
on. Alright, now she's back up in there. Like
I said, when we start tightening this upper bolt back down we want to make sure it doesn't
get bound down inside the sheaves so we get an accurate torque reading.
Alright guys, we've got it tightened down a little bit, and now we want to go ahead
and set it to 37 ft-lbs. This is a little awkward. We want to get the
tool back in there on the other side where it can hold it in place. This is where a third
arm would be nice but we'll make it. There you go. Not binding anywhere, going
the right direction. All that's left now is just put the cover
back on. Make sure before you put the cover back on
that this seal's in pretty good shape, because if not you'll have water get in there and
that will wear out your clutches in a hurry. What I mentioned about water intrusion? This
is another clutch off of course a completely different machine. You can see all the wear
on the inside of these sheaves, and they basically made a mess out of it. I wouldn't even want
to imagine trying to drive a machine with this on there. It would not be pleasant.
Alright guys, we've got our belt in there, we've got all our ten 10mm bolts back on this
cover, we've got our frame support back in, got it tightened down, and the only thing
left now is just to put on the tire and go take it for a spin.
I want to take a little bit of time to break in the belt correctly. Just don't start hammering
it right off the get-go. Let it kind of work itself into those sheaves so it will get a
lot of tension built up on it. You don't want to burn it early or anything like that.
Listen, if there's something I missed, something you couldn't see, or you have a question about
how I did it, just leave that in the comments section below and I'll do my best to answer
it. If you need any of the parts that we used, come see us at partzilla.com and until next
time I just want to say thanks for watching.