1971 Arctic Cat Snowmobile Sitting 15+ years! Will it Run!?!?!

[Applause] all right meatball let it go oh the bloodhound dug that out of the snow bank last night he started pawing at the snow in one little spot and one little sh and he found it under like 10 inches of snow which is pretty impressive anyways we think buddy what do you think what come on oh it's a good rust go well i said i'd never buy one a snowmobile that is uh mainly because we don't ever get enough snow around here this is probably the best winter we've had in probably 10 plus years and we're actually scheduled to get some more snow we probably got about 10 12 inches on the ground now and we're supposed to get another one to three tonight and a few more in the days coming so naturally i hit marketplace looking up for a snowmobile and i didn't find anything so i ended up horse training an old farmer buddy of mine that's had this thing sitting in his barn for a good 15 to 20 years he estimates without being touched and we drug it out today and he traded me five gallons of diesel fuel for this beautiful sled so what is it it's an arctic cat 340. i believe it's a cheetah i'm not real familiar with them it's a 1971 and youtube has just been flooded with uh videos of snowmobiles lately and uh that's cause we got snow all of us youtubers up here in the north or anywhere that gets snow it's that time of year so but anyways let's get this thing down off the truck and shove it into the garage here and see if we can't get this thing fired up there goes the windshield it was already busted as you may have already noticed she's a bit of a fixer-upper she's a beaut clark right so as i think i mentioned it is a 1971 been sitting easily 15 20 years he says and she's pretty rough all the way around but not bad for five gallons of diesel fuel belt seems to be still flexible enough usable it's got plenty of baling wire on the exhaust so you know it's not going anywhere windshield's a little busted up and i definitely didn't help it any when i pulled it down off the truck so it had electric start and the guy told me the guy that he got it from had jimmied something with it and he never used it i don't know i haven't even tried it to see if it pulls over yet i think it's moving oh yeah she's got compression carburetor here is looking pretty gunky uh but it's a diaphragm pump type carburetor so there's no like fuel bowl down here to take off and clean so we might get really lucky and just be able to put some gas in this thing and fire it up but if not we're gonna have to get a new diaphragm for this carburetor because i'm sure it's probably hardened up i see a little bit of mouse house built up in here so it'd probably be a good idea for us to pull off this engine housing cover and make sure there's no mouse nest built up on top of the engine so that it doesn't catch fire as soon as we do get it running he had moved it before he told me to come get it and yeah that's what happened so i can't tell for sure but it almost seems like this whole piece down here was machined out of a casting and they turned a spindle down solid so i'm not sure what we're going to have to do there might be able to weld something might not obviously the seats in pretty rough shape but she's got this sweet sweet cheetah seat cover on there so that's pretty happening well here's a speedometer it says we've got 687 miles on the clock not sure i trust that and she reads like she goes all the way to 100 but i'm gonna bet that this sled can't do it light switch choke still moves that's good throttle still moves kill switch is busted off dimmer switch and a break which also still moves but it's kind of stiff um so yeah the key there is none that's that's another issue so we'll have to probably pop that out of there and bypass it if i can't find a key that just jams in there and works sometimes you get lucky well i found one just realized there's a glove box here too let's check that out nice nice we got a nice big mouse house in there oh that's lovely good spare probably well chewed drive belt um uh lots of other goodies in here that i'm not gonna rummage my fingers through at the moment all right time for a little sucky sucky time to evict the mice so so found the fossilized remains of about uh i don't know six six or eight spark plugs here those are all scrappers but one that's maybe savable here looks pretty clean it does look like it was run a little bit but probably just flooded out and they swapped it some more fossilized pliers screwdrivers plug wrench we will keep that in there and uh some electrical tape probably oh it's still good this must be good stuff wow that's some real good electrical tape definitely going to save that this stuff here now we keep this great straight screwdriver and that phillips looks about useless yeah the rest of that garbage we go ahead and pull off this engine tin that way we can make sure there's no mouse condominiums underneath here at least i'm gonna try maybe no this ain't going good boy those are on there whoo that's not good why would you use straight screws okay it took some doing but i was finally able to get all the screws out of this thing yeah not too bad i mean definitely good that we did it pretty crusty but there's no like full big huge nest laying up here which is what i was afraid of oh that looks a lot better i guess while we're here we'll go ahead and pull these plugs out see what they look like not too bad looks pretty good yeah this one's telling a little bit different story it's been run a lot more this plug's definitely a lot newer but uh still not bad it looks like it would run while i have the plugs out we'll go ahead and check for spark well that right there might be the writing on the wall for us since this plug is newer and this is also the side that doesn't appear to be firing i'm going to go out on a limb and say that they replace this plug trying to get it to run on this cylinder and it was actually the coil hopefully that's not the case hopefully hopefully i can find other reasons for it not working coil wires definitely got a little bit of mouse damage but not too bad not that would stop it from firing hmm so to be certain that thing isn't going to fire and i don't think it is i'll spray a little bit of ether in here with that plug wire off and if it doesn't pop we'll know and then i'll add that other plug wire back in and try it and we'll see what happens just as i suspected yep fired right off that time oh dang it well our coil packs are both down here underneath the carbonator and it's going to be a lot easier to get to those without that thing in the way so i'll go ahead and pull this rock hard fuel line off of here maybe man yeah there that's that's exactly how brutal it is it just shattered pretty bad day when you got a fuel line kicking your butt there we go the struggle is real today that one just broke right off like a good boy oh right a lot of you know that i'm not very good at electrical stuff it's kind of my uh learning curve this is the things i've been trying to improve on over the years here but to test something like this against a known good coil so what i've done i'm omen this out from the plug wire to the body of the coil and i'm not sure if that's the way you're supposed to test it but i'm getting a solid reading here while it's building which i don't know but anyways you can see it's kind of like around 17 17 9 bounces around a bit but it's in the teens okay now if you move our lead over to the other plug wire and we're gonna be on the known good coil now we know this one functions now we'll go ahead and do that same test against the known good coil and watch the meter as you can see it's holding real steady at 5.9 so obviously there's got to be a problem in that other coil so i'm like 99 sure that other coil is bad i guess we'll go ahead and pop that off there and see if we can order up another one i haven't even peaked in this fuel tank yet but we need a way to get fuel to the engine and that's usually what your fuel tank's for oh it's not going to be good look how rusty that thing is oh there's still fuel in it you guys see that oh man that is not good what a mess very rusty very varnished smells good though i like that smell a lot of people say they hate it but i'm all about it okay oh lovely oh more more mice damage all right i got my little suction pump down in the tank here let's see what level of nasty we're working with oh yeah that's beautiful huh um you can just smell the the minwax smell oh there's a good bit in there [Applause] i don't think i would have run on this what do you guys think you guys know what would run on this slave lake if border restrictions weren't so tight i'd love to bottle this up and ship it up the peg i'm certain that old slave lake would be running on this thing that is just the nicest stuff oh i hope you guys can see in here wowzers there is just a mountain of crap in the bottom of this tank it's got to be like an inch or two thick wow it's bad guys it's real bad there you can kind of see there so i'm not even going to attempt to clean that out right now uh we need to make sure this thing runs and moves first so i guess we'll go ahead and throw a temporary tank on it and see what happens well guys the old gopro hero 9 strikes again i just realized i lost a bunch of footage uh what you missed was me taking the carburetor apart going through it it wasn't very dirty and then i put it in the cleaner to soak for a while all right i've actually had this carburetor in here 24 hours or thereabouts pull this thing out clean it up best we can [Music] so normally i wouldn't even try to put this back together with what i have here but like i said i'm having difficulty finding the parts and there's a big snowstorm coming and it would be awesome to have a snowmobile when we get this big snowstorm so even if i find one at this point it's not going to get here in time for me to do some sledding so i'm just going to go ahead and give it my best to clean this thing up and putting it back together and probably won't work but i can say i tried but what if it does [Music] work [Music] so [Music] all right carburetor's all reassembled uh it's not perfect because i couldn't replace all the seals and gaskets and stuff but definitely looks a lot better than it did and i think i found a couple things in there that would have been stopping us from getting fuel so hopefully that takes care of it hopefully i don't hook gas up to it and just start leaking gas everywhere and hopefully this baby runs [Music] everything should be good to go let's go ahead and try this probably no point in connecting that wire because that coil is dead but we'll do it anyway here's the hoping that's not good also i pulled the muffler off of it uh something fell down under it so i just pulled it off and it's got a bunch of cracks in it so might as well weld it up before i put that back together but i'm not going to bother if the thing doesn't run so it should be nice and loud is what i'm getting at more choke let's choke go with less [Music] choke [Laughter] oh we're close it runs it almost sounded like that cylinder was kicking in too which i'm interested in oh it smells good what happened are you quit running all right i don't exactly remember where i left off this thing it's been about a week or two since i've messed with it but i could not get this carburetor to work so i went ahead and ordered a rebuild kit which it took me a little bit of looking to find this is a wda-1 and everywhere i was looking online said fitzwd carburetors but not wda-1 so the ebay listing said that this one fit it so hopefully it does anyways you've already seen me tear this thing apart once we'll just go ahead and do a quick time lapse slapping the new kid in here [Music] so i got the carburetor all put back together there but before i put it on i went ahead and picked up a new coil for this thing and it's going to be a lot easier to install without the carburetor in the way so let's get that thrown on now [Music] [Music] the coil is in got a plug in there go ahead and make sure this thing fires oh yeah nice blue spark and uh it even fired up there for a split second which surprised the heck out of me since there's no carburetor must have been a little bit of residual gas laying down in the crankcase or something but uh sweet i got the muffler pulled off of this thing too it's got a big crack in here goes clear from here up and around down into here all the way over into the other side it's only hanging on by a very small piece over here so i hate welding on exhaust but this thing doesn't feel too thin so hopefully i can just put some hot snot on it and call it a day [Music] well it's not pretty but welding something like this never is oh i missed a little holder i got to fix that one yet but it's turning out all right should hold i don't understand how i got it out of here a little bit of persuasion look at that okay i got everything put back together here got a new coil put on here the carburetor has been rebuilt now uh i still got a temporary fuel tank rigged up here and yeah i'm really hoping we get to go i want to fix the muffler fingers crossed here i don't even know why that started because there wasn't even fuel on the lines yet that was nuts but really good oh boy that's tickled well i pulled the plugs out to check them to see if we're getting too much fuel or not enough and sure enough they're both soaked so i'm gonna go ahead and try and turn these jets in a little bit needles rather and i don't know that that's gonna make much difference but i can try so oh okay let's see if this thing will restart for us now not looking good well hot dang she runs pretty good all right now that she's all buttoned up let's go take this thing for a rip eh so dang it it would appear that i waited on parts a bit too long and uh all that white stuff's gone that we're supposed to ride this thing on and i gotta admit i knew it wasn't gonna move anyways first of all i still didn't fix this thing that's a problem second of all after i started working on it in the garage here i started finding these white chunks all over the place which uh if you don't know i only know because a vice grip garage those are pieces of your track sprocket that's what drives the belt underneath here that propels you through the snow and there should be two of those and what happens after they sit as they get really brittle and that's why these things are just breaking apart those are supposed to be very strong plastic but for some reason time does not do well to them so if you guys know where to get some vintage arctic cat parts you guys let me know or i'm also thinking the sled's pretty rough i don't know that it's worth putting a lot of money into because i did do a cursory look around the internet for sprockets to drive this thing and the ones i found uh they didn't quite look right and they were also eighty dollars a piece so that's a good chunk of change on a sled that's not worth more than two three hundred dollars i can pretty much find these things all day long on facebook marketplace for under five and that's in running riding condition so i'm thinking you know even if the sled's not worth saving maybe we could do some sort of pretty cool repower project in the future with the old 340 tucked under the hood here i was thinking like pretty intense go-kart or maybe even more intense drift trike something like that thought that would be pretty cool so like i said if you know where to get some parts on the cheap let me know down in the comments and if you want to see me wedge this motor into something else let me know down in the comments as well and maybe we'll do that in the future so anyways guys if you like tinkering in the garage getting stuff running that hasn't run in quite a long time or heavy equipment or engines of all shapes and sizes if you like beautiful cheetah print seat covers go ahead and hit the thumbs up button on this video if you haven't already you're probably going to want to subscribe so you don't miss any future content but that's it for me thanks for hanging out with me i'll catch you guys in the next video thanks for watching later [Music] you

Channel: Diesel Creek

Views: 352,863

Keywords: cheetah, puma, panther, arctic, cat, sled, skidoo, ski doo, yamaha, bombardier, kawasaki, 2-stroke, stroke, cycle, twin cylinder, 340, 440, old, vintage, snow, machine

Id: Jik3fHqHAUE

Length: 33min 34sec (2014 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 04 2021