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Yamaha sleds move fast, but changing major components for any manufacturer is not often a quick process. It’s been a while since Yamaha produced an extensive upgrade of their CVT clutches, perhaps for good reason. Yamaha clutches have always boasted solid design with few problems and lots of tuning options for their varied models.
Let’s examine the history of Yamaha clutching, and the OEM’s philosophy of durability combined with tuning options. With more than four decades of snowmobile CVT experience, Yamaha made all the right moves with its new YSRC clutch! It’s a solid piece of engineering that undoubtedly has progressed through several years of design and testing.
History is clutch
Yamaha clutches have been in gradual development since the 1970s, always in response to new demands from more powerful engines. There have been a number of innovations along the way that made them easy to tune. In the late 1970s, Yamaha came out with a set of racing weights with several locations on the back of the flyweights where extra mass could be screwed on. This was long before the now-popular aftermarket weights offered this feature.
Yamaha engineers, however, felt that screwing extra mass onto the flyweight was not reliable enough, so this design evolved into the current flyweights, which have several holes through them where rivets of different material and weight can be riveted solidly in place in order to fine-tune each flyweight’s mass and center of gravity.