A few months ago the new Polaris Razor XP 1000 showed up at the shop. Like little kids on Christmas Day, any Lineman that was around was in and out of this machine checking everything out. We soon found out that this Side-by-side has all the bells and whistles. Enclosed cab with heat and a/c, power windows, winch with wireless remote and auto-stop, front and rear facing cameras, tilt bed, flip up windshield, and removable doors. The whole cab can be removed but there really isn’t a point in doing that with the ability to remove the door and flip the windshield up. Of course we had to go take it out into the yard and do some test driving. :wink:wink.
A month or so later the tracks came in. These are a must around here. Chasing power outages along steep snow covered hillsides with regular tires doesn’t work… trust me, we have tried. With tracks all the way around this machine will go damn near anywhere!! I’ve taken our old machine on tracks through 3-4 foot of snow. Pretty impressive!! Instead of sending the new side-by-side off someplace to have the tracks installed, us Lineman just do it ourselves. A couple hours of down time at the end of the day and the tracks were installed and working great!!
One big issue with these machines is the drive belt and clutch. Having to rev the engine to get the clutch and belt to engage and not to mention the awful noise it makes. I’ve had a belt completely explode on my while cruising down a gravel road patrolling the powerlines looking for the cause of an outage. Chunks of the belt came flying into the cab smashing me in the head and face. “WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT!!” Then I was stranded… Well we installed a new clutch made by Duraclutch along with a new belt. Rumor has it that this clutch is the cat’s meow. Engages at a very low rpm and a whole lot of other complicated mechanical things that I’m not too go at explaining. Lol
Now that we have tracks on it and a bad ass clutch, it’s time to add some lights. In the past we would send this to a mechanic shop where we take all our other vehicles to get serviced. We wouldn’t see the side-by-side for a month or more. Screw that!! We are installing our lights ourselves. Of course we need some serious lights on the front, so we added 2-LED light bars to the bumper above the winch.
The switch in the cab has both a HI and LO settings. We wired the LED light bars in a way that when switched to LO, just the lower LED comes on. Then when switched to HI, the upper and lower LEDs are on for that daytime feel in the middle of the night.
Next was to add some reverse/work lights to the back of the cab. Routing the wires back there was a huge pain in the ass. There aren’t any plastic mounding pieces that pop off in order to hide the wires under. It took a while to find a path to the back of the cab where all the wires would be hidden and protected, but we found a way.
We really didn’t want to drill any holes in the back of the new cab or the metal frame work. We ended up utilizing one of the existing bolt holes that holds the top of the cab to the steel frame of the cab.
This put the lights out on the edge of the cab. They didn’t stick up over the cab or out past the side of the cab where they could potentially get ripped off when driving under low hanging tree branches or overgrown trails. These LEDs put off a 140 degree flood light, they should have no problem putting a little light on the situation.
Only a couple days later and it was time to test out our light installation and how this new clutch works along with the tracks. An early morning outage call came in at 4am, it’s a brisk 10F outside with a nice 10-15 mph mountain breeze and 3-4 inches of snow. There are sections of the powerline that need to be inspected that go up and over some pretty steep hills. I’m talking hills so steep that you have to revers back up them. Attempting to turn around would cause a roll over for sure!! First thing we noticed was this clutch had amazing stopping power when going down these steep grades. Just let off the throttle and the clutch would bring the side-by-side to a stop. No need to use the brake. You had to give it some throttle in order to go down the steep grade… CRAZY!!! Shifting into gears was so smooth also, what a difference!!
The lights… well what did you expect. They work great!! The upper light is tilted up slightly so we can see the top of the poles. There was no problem seeing the top of a 45 foot pole, it was lit up like it was day light. Take a look through the binoculars and we were able to see if there were any cracked or broke insulators. Damn that’s nice!!
Our next project in the making is to build a rack over the bed and cab of the side-by-side. A place where we can strap down material and tools that are too long to fit in the bed. I wouldn’t doubt it if we added more lights too. Lol.
This machine is super nice and has a hefty price tag to go with it. To us Lineman, our company, and customers, this is money well spent. We can patrol sections of line 100 times faster that how we used to have to do it… on foot. Lessening the outage time and keeping us from freezing to death on these cold winter mornings. *:wink:wink
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