My 1100t sled ground the gears in reverse just a little one time. So I tore the sled apart and discovered that my sled has all the new updates. What a poor design! They have all the wrong pivot points. The shift fork with the three gear teeth that does the shifting, is too narrow and creates binding on the shift fork. The washers with the springs hold this shifting fork in place, but there is not enough throw to get full engagement of either forward or reverse gear. Forward gear lacks .145" from a full shift and when in reverse, the gear only makes 50% engagement of the reverse gear. Now the reverse gear is only about 1/4" inch wide. That means that when the gear is in reverse, you only have about .125" engagement. I have a feeling that the engineers that designed this reverse system just graduated from grade school! With this system, you have high rotating mass because it uses two chains and four sprocket. Why didn't the engineers at least look at a Yamaha or some other sled with a mechanical reverse. The forward gear has very small splines and will not handle high loading. They should have build the two forward gears with a 1 to 3 degree negative draft angle so that forward motion would actually pull the gears tighter. Of course, this is what a good engineer would have done, not someone just out of grade school. They would have also used gears instead of two more sprockets and another chain! This truly is a system designed to fail. I was going to fix mine, but decided to remove all the reverse junk and machine a cone and bolt the forward gear solid. Otherwise, I know it will break! I am just glad that Arctic Cat didn't build the engine!
