So, I’ll start by saying I read a lot of reviews on the Sportsman 570 before I bought mine. I has two concerns. One was heat, and the other was possibly needing shims installed to fix the "very hard to shift into gear issue". When I got my new quad home and was taking it off the trailer, I had a heck of a time getting it into gear. I was sick at my stomach. Brand new, and I thought I’d have to take it to the shop.

Well, I rode it a couple of times and found that the problem wasn’t consistent, but just kind of random. I thought maybe it just needed to be "broke in". Still worrying about it, as I worry too much anyways, today I called a local dealership and talked to their service manager. He was perhaps the nicest service manager I’ve ever talked to. lol I explained my issue and concerns and asked if he thought the shims are what I needed. He told me that the newer quads (Not sure if he was referring to 2016-2017, or just 2017) have a different setup and there is actually no "shimming" abilities on them. He offered these two pieces of advice to reduce or eliminate the hard shifting:

1. When stopping, always set the parking break BEFORE putting the bike into Park, especially if on any kind of slope. This keeps some of the lateral pressure off the gears allowing an easier shift.
2. When first starting out, let the bike idle for a minute. The bike will usually idle around 1400 and then slow down to around 1200-1250. Waiting for that slower idle may also allow for an easier shift.

Now, obviously most of you have a lot more experience in these quads than I do, and I’m sure some of you have more experience than that service manager as well. Maybe this is common knowledge, maybe it’s not true… but I believe these two bits of information seem to help. So for anyone else who may be new, maybe it will help. I’m coming from sport quads, so this was kind of new to me. Just wanted to pass that along.