If your not comfortable checking the sled out do you know someone with some experience with these models to go over it for you? You can decide the overall condition fairly easily, are the running boards and sides of the tunnel straight? stand at the back and look down the length of them. Does the sled sit level and look "square" to you? Are the radius rods straight? Flip the thing on it's side and look underneath for any obvious damage, bent trailing arms, again just look down the length of them. Is the track missing drive lugs? missing paddles? any wear spots from rubbing on something? Are the stirrups straight or are they wrinkled where the trailing arms bolt up to the chassie. Are the skies parallel to each other? are the handlebars pointing straight ahead when the skies are? Are the skags/carbides in reasonable shape? Are the handlebars bent to the side? Do all the lights work? Can you do a compression test on it? it should be very close from cylinder to cylinder, it's hard to say what the compression should be due to your elevation and the guage your using but about 130 to 140? With only 950 miles the primary clutch should be in reasonable shape, if you can, pull the belt then open the clutch with a big screwdriver or bar, some guys have a clip they can fit over the sheaves to hold the clutch open, but if your carefull with the bar you can take a good look at the rollers and weights, the rollers should be snug on the pins with no visible wear and the weights shouldn't be able to rock from side to side. Have a good look at the belt, any worn spots or cords sticking out of the side? does it have a spare belt? Some of the 800's did have crank problems, some ran forever and didn't, the only way to tell if a crank MIGHT be failing is to check the runout on the pto end, you need to pull the clutch and put a dial indicator on the crank stub, rotate the engine slowly and see how many thou. out of round the crank is. To me anything over 0.002 is starting to get iffy, polaris says up to 0.004 is OK, I disagree. I could go on and on here, the most important thing to check on a BB 800 is the runout on the crank. Almost every sled I've ever bought needed the primary clutch rebuilt and thats not cheap to do but with low miles you should be ok. Some of the best advice I can give you is when you go look at this sled look around the guys place, is his shop a mess? tools scattered around? does his car have a big dent in the fender? is there crap all over the yard? You can tell alot about a piece of equipment someone is selling by the way their yard looks. if it's a mess the equipment will be to, if everything is neat and tidy well he's probably anal about his stuff and the sled won't be any different. I guess the difference between a good deal and a bad deal is what you pay for the thing. Good luck
Edit: I should also say I love the old polaris edge chassie big blocks. IMHO the best bang for your buck out there. The 700's are possibly the better sled, they give up very little HP to the 800 and generally don't have crank issues. Either model with a few mods can easily run with the new sleds and do it for alot less money
