2009-2011 Diamond Drive Bearing Failure

[GlennRMK]

Cover fit on just fine. I used a rubber mallet and tapped it on all around.

Could push it tight against the gasket by hand. Tightened up and added fluid. No leaks yet.

 

[bgreen776]

I am being picky, and it probably won't matter, but you could still have pre-load on that bearing even if you could push the cover down by hand.

 

[boondocker97]

Well I pulled dad's 09 m1000 apart last week Friday and the bearing looked fine, but I pulled the seal and the cage was coming apart-700 miles. Replaced it with another single row bearing to ride on Sunday (now double rows in town). Lots of black sludge in the bottom that the flush didn't get out so make sure you pull these drives apart and clean them by hand once a year.

 

[bgreen776]

Well I pulled dad's 09 m1000 apart last week Friday and the bearing looked fine, but I pulled the seal and the cage was coming apart-700 miles. Replaced it with another single row bearing to ride on Sunday (now double rows in town). Lots of black sludge in the bottom that the flush didn't get out so make sure you pull these drives apart and clean them by hand once a year.

Nice work boondocker, I dont think anyone pointed out that if you dont pull the seal you may not ever know if your bearing cage is starting to fail or not. Even then It would be wise for anyone thats going to do the inspection to go ahead and replace the bearing. You can't always tell if you have a bad bearing just by look, listen, and feel techniques. And once you inspect/replace the bearing, whether it be 5203 or 6203, you still need to find the cause of the problem. You still need to find out of your side loading the bearing because your tunnel is too narrow.

Some people have pm'd me asking how to determine this, I'll post again because I was less than clear the first time. There is also an alternative to removing and machining the trackshaft. Both methods will work...

 

[bgreen776]

To find out how much I needed to machine off the end of my track-shaft I tipped my sled onto its side, removed the secondary clutch, removed the foot-well bracket, and loosened the nuts that hold the gearcase to the tunnel until they were all well clear of the gear case. The case should not spring away from the tunnel, but if it does, you will need to measure how much to determine how much to machine from the track-shaft or the backside of the ring gear.

and for reference

 

[bgreen776]

Another way you can measure this is to mount a dial indicator on the cover, zero the gage, then loosen all the nuts. This is probably the most accurate way to gage how much material you need to remove from the ring gear or the track-shaft. The "most correct" way to remove the material, in my opinion, is to take half from the shoulder where the track shaft seats against the bearings on the brake side, and half from the snout where it seats up against the ring gear.

BDX mentioned in a previous post that you could take a bit extra to ensure the load is on the large bearing on the back of the ring gear. I think this is an excellet idea as that bearing should be able to handle many times the load vs. the 6203 or even the 5203 bearing on the transfer gear. The question here is how much extra do you take. If you take too much you risk overloading the aluminum case.



The other place you can remove material to account for the narrow chassis is the ring gear. The advantage here is that you don't have to pull the suspension and track shaft, the disadvantage is that if the brake side of the tunnel is stiffer than the gearcase side you will be further offsetting the shaft to that side of the tunnel, and if you cut too much you could have sealing problems and gearcase to track-shaft interference problems. Here is a picture of where you would remove that material.

 

[bgreen776]

A few pictures of using a dial indicator to gage how much material to remove to account for the narrow tunnel.

Zero the gage

Loosen or remove the nuts that hold the case to the tunnel

 

[skudmissle]

same story on my 09, 750 miles and it was shot, I'm gonna run it this winter with the 3203 then upgrade to a complete BDX. Cover went on by hand, no maching required.

 

[silverram323]

WOW, you guys are really getting into this. Are we getting paid from CAT for fixing there engineering flaws? All this makes me want to pull my case and see if i need to rework the shaft. Would any machine shop be able to turn down the shaft? What kind of questions do I ask them to make sure they can do it right? I don't want them to F*** it up and i have to buy a new shaft.

 

[bgreen776]

I wouldn't trust just any machine shop to cut the ring gear to account for the narrow tunnel, or the transfer gear to fit the wider 5203 bearing because these shafts are pretty hard. But any machine shop with a 10" lathe should be able to cut the track shaft to account for the narrow tunnel (track shaft is good steel, but still very machinable). A good shop should be able to cut the gears. A good, industrial repair shop that is. I've not met an automotive machine shop that I would use for this kind of work, they usually don't have the right tools, or the right experience.

How do you know if the shop is capable of doing quality work on exotic materials? Explain to them that the material is harder than the hubs of hell and ask them if they have a diamond wheel for their toolpost grinder. If they look at you like this ... take your job somewhere else. If they have one, ask to see it, take an interest in it and the kind of work they do, and ask for a really quick tour of their facility. Any shop worth a you know what will be either way too busy to show you around, or they will be happy to give you a tour. If they are too busy, they probably won't take the job, if they are happy to give you a tour, you can look around and see what kind of work they are doing. If all they do is thread pipe, you might be best off talking your business elsewhere, if they are building gas turbine parts, etc... you've come to the right place. And you can always tell them that a new set of gears costs $xxx, or a new track-shaft costs $xxx, and ask if they will guarantee their work (good shops will, and if they won't, its because you are asking them to do something beyond their normal scope of work, not necessarily that they are a bad shop). If they won't guarantee their work, take it somewhere else unless its worth the risk.

Once again, just to be absolutely clear. A person should cut the Track-shaft or the Ring Gear to take the load off the little bearing, and if necessary, cut the transfer gear to make the 5203 bearing fit properly. We want the wider 5203 bearing because its capable of handling more load, always a good thing, and we might as well at this point. The wider, stronger, 5203 is not a to fix to the root cause. We need to take the axial load off this bearing, 5203 or not.

There are a couple other potentially viable options that I haven't fully verified, and since I haven't actually tested them myself, and likely wont, I don't think I want to discuss them here yet. If you absolutely can't get the track-shaft machined, send me a PM.

 

[silverram323]

Ttt

 

[bgreen776]

Just to make things more interesting and quite a bit more complicated, there is a VERY good chance that many of these bearings are failing due to angular misalignment problems, and/or the problems we have been talking about for the last few weeks.

This is evidenced by the witness marks on my 2010 M8 planetary and similar marks on my fathers 2009 HCR planetary, as shown in the following picture.

When you un-bolt the case from the tunnel, see if you can detect a disparity in the gap from one end or the other. If your case, like mine, touches at the the front, but not at the back, you have an angular misalignment problem. This angular misalignment causes the transfer gear bearing (the 6203) bearing to see much more load than it was designed for. This problem likely wasn't apparent in the 07/08 cases because the transfer gear was much longer, therefore putting the bearing closer to the pivot point and loading the bearing less. In effect, the ring gear/output shaft is being "leveraged" by the right hand tunnel, through the bearing housing/brake assembly, into trackshaft and over to the gearcase and its associated assemblies. When everything is bolted up, entire assembly is in a bind.

Think of it like a truck with independent front suspension.

If this were a transfercase in a truck, there would be a driveshaft and some u-joints between the t-case and the front diff, even though those parts basically never move in relation to each other. But they do actually move, and it would be silly to try to make them so precisely aligned that you could use a solid coupling between them. Frame flex, manufacturing tolerances, etc, etc, etc. Well... this is what we are expecting from our diamond drives.

So what's the fix? How can we align our gearcase to the trackshaft? With common hand tools, we can't. Its my opinion, at this point, that the best "we" can do is to check to see if our tunnel is out of spec, if it is, we should machine the trackshaft, and do whatever is necessary to get a 5203 bearing on the transfer gear. I think this will likely be enough to get us by. If that proves out in the long run to not be enough, I'd say the next step is to take a port-a-power to the tunnel or start machining cases to account for the angular misalignment, or build tapered shims.

 

[Alaskan_awd]

I'm afraid to touch mine, way over my head. I think I'll leave it for now and let the warranty do its work even though I run the risk of being out of a ride. Maybe Cat will get something figured out or I'll mess with it when the warranty is out. Good info though thanks.

 

[clarkee75]

After reading thru this thread time and time again perhaps AC should go back to a chain case setup for 2011...Changed out my bearing but it seems like there are more issues with 09/10 DD as brgreen776 digs deeper. Thanks for the info dude!!

 

[bgreen776]

I'm afraid to touch mine, way over my head. I think I'll leave it for now and let the warranty do its work even though I run the risk of being out of a ride. Maybe Cat will get something figured out or I'll mess with it when the warranty is out. Good info though thanks.

I appreciate the thanks, but I invested 5-6 hours of my time to dig into this for my own benefit. Please don't take this personally, or as any sort of attack, but as a personal request... I invested 20-25 hours of my time to document it, write it up, and post it here in a hopefully clear and understandable manner for your benefit, and the benefit of anyone that owns one of these sleds. We need to inspect our sleds, discover the problem or lack there of, and report it to our dealers so they can push that information to the manuf. Only this will get the problem fixed. If not a recall for our currently owned sleds, then for future models. I have considered the options, and even after being run through the wringer on my 08 M1000, I decided to go with Arctic Cat this year because I believe in the company and I think they are the best sleds on the market.

All a guy has to do is pull the secondary, then remove 8 nuts. If you have a bad problem a flashlight and an untrained eye is all you need.

Pretty please?

 

[bgreen776]

After reading thru this thread time and time again perhaps AC should go back to a chain case setup for 2011...Changed out my bearing but it seems like there are more issues with 09/10 DD as brgreen776 digs deeper. Thanks for the info dude!!

No way brother, I love the DD. Its superior in nearly every way. Until someone comes out with a chaincase that is a MAJOR improvement over whats on the market right now, I'll keep my Diamond Drives. Breaking chains on the hill sucks.

This thread has grown into a monster, but I haven't seen any indication that this is a deal breaker. Me and my family have put thousands of very hard miles on diamond drives since 05, so far we have spent a grand total of 30 dollars repairing them. I cant say that for the chain cases I've run over that same length of time!

 

[clarkee75]

No way brother, I love the DD. Its superior in nearly every way. Until someone comes out with a chaincase that is a MAJOR improvement over whats on the market right now, I'll keep my Diamond Drives. Breaking chains on the hill sucks.

This thread has grown into a monster, but I haven't seen any indication that this is a deal breaker. Me and my family have put thousands of very hard miles on diamond drives since 05, so far we have spent a grand total of 30 dollars repairing them. I cant say that for the chain cases I've run over that same length of time!

Ya i after looking back ive smashed a few chain cases in my day too I wish i personally knew the head of the R&D department at Cat....bgreen you would have a new job! Next time im at my dealer im gonna tell him to read this thread if he hasent already...afterall it seems us riders put everything to the ultimate test. Thanks again for the info bgreen...a picture is worth a thousand words....especially on Snowest!

 

[Snofox]

Anyone that have went to the wider bearing put many miles on them yet? Inspections done? 300 miles on my 09 m1000 and with my luck this will be my problem. Gotta check it out...

 

[silverram323]

Ive put on 500 miles, no inspection yet, I plan on taking a peek this week as i have two big trips in feburary.

 

[bgreen776]

Anyone that have went to the wider bearing put many miles on them yet? Inspections done? 300 miles on my 09 m1000 and with my luck this will be my problem. Gotta check it out...

I've put close to 100 pretty hard miles on mine at this point, so far, so good. Two inspections.