Since my Grizzly will be two years old in May, I've been doing its annual maintenance over the past couple of weekends.
Last weekend I cleaned and regreased the primary clutch, and this weekend I changed the oil (at 32 hours), adjusted the valves, and since the service manual says to change the coolant every two years, I did that too.
I replaced the coolant with GM DexCool -- the orange stuff that's supposed to be good for the life of the vehicle. While I doubt that, I will probably change my coolant change interval to 3-5 years instead of every two.
Changing it wasn't hard at all. I had to remove the left side floorboard to get to the coolant reservoir, and also the front rack and hood to get to the radiator cap. But since I was doing the valves at the same time, the rack and hood were already off.
All you do is remove the radiator cap and then remove the little 8mm coolant drain plug. Coolant comes spewing out (even cold), so watch out. I'm now splattered with it.
Anyway, with that done, I removed the drain hose to the reservoir and drained all of that out.
Next, I rolled the machine outside and got the garden hose and gave it a good flush. I flushed it until I saw no more green tinted water coming out, and until the water coming out stopped foaming. Then I let it sit for a few minutes to finish drip-draining, while I hunted down a container to measure out the required 1.8L of coolant and water that it wanted.
First I dumped in approximately 0.9L of distilled water, and then measured out the coolant and poured it in. It didn't take it all... I put the remaining 0.3L into the reservoir, which filled it exactly to the fill line.
Now, a question to anybody still reading. Do you check your oil level much between changes? If so, how often do you have to add oil? I didn't check mine at all this time... in fact, I rarely do. What I discovered was when I dumped the oil oil into an empty Castrol Act-Evo container (which has markings for each liter), I discovered that only one liter of oil came out. That means it's burned half of its oil in 32 hours.
I've also noticed for a long time that it takes more than the 1.9L the instructions say. I'm figuring it takes closer to 2.1 or 2.2L.
Later this afternoon if I'm still motivated, I'm going to dive back into the crankcase cover and pull the secondary clutch out, disassemble and clean it. It feels like it isn't backshifting as far as it should... it really seems to struggle, even in Low gear, whereas it didn't used to. I know I'm about due for a belt too, but I haven't ordered one yet. Maybe I can remember to do that on Monday.
Rob
