Well not upside down exactly but on it’s side. I was riding in a dry creekbed a couple days ago and misjudged the off camber and rolled my Sportsman XP 1000 highlifter on it’s side. Slow gentle roll and I didn’t think much of it. I figured they MUST design these things knowing at some point most people will turn it over so no big deal. Apparently NOT. It ran for about 10 seconds before I remembered there was a kill switch by the left grip and I didn’t have to get to the key. I noticed a little oil on the upper cover dripping down so I got to winching back up pretty quickly so it was on it’s right side for maybe 3 minutes. In that 3 minutes it managed to leak out a quart of oil into my airbox soaking my filter and I could hear the oil glug glug in the air intake snorkel when I started it up. After that I was also blowing clouds of white smoke out the exhaust if I got on it. The day was over and I limped to the truck and loaded up and went home.
Today I cleaned all the oil out of the filter box and replaced the filter and thought all was ok but as soon as I put it back together and started it I still heard the glug glug of air going through oil and after opening the airbox saw the bottom covered with oil again and my filter starting to get wet again.
If it had been a worse rollover and it had been upside down instead of on it’s side and it took me awhile to get it up on the rubber again, which could have easly happened, it would have emptied all the oil out of the crank case. Then what do you do if you are far from the truck?
So I guess I have to start pulling body parts off to try and find the reservoir of oil in my air system and clean it out. Which is a pain in thearse. I haven’t done it and don’t exactly even know how to go about it, but I hope my fender guards don’t have to come off. Polaris doesn’t make them for the Highlifter so modifications had to be done to get them to fit, so removing and reinstalling them is not a piece of cake. This could take hours.
I’m definitely going to find a better place for the crankcase vent tube to go so this can’t happen again.
I guess Polaris thinks everyone only rides around in parking lots and never tests the limits of what the machine can do. I’ll bet it will happen again, so I need to change some things so that it doesn’t effect as much next time. Anybody have any ideas on that?
