This is a follow-up on Maciek’s previous post: The Endless Snow Mobile Ordeal
When we last left off with our snowmobile ordeal, our battery wasn’t being charged by the engine. The most likely culprit (after eliminating a few other options) was the stator coil, which is essentially the alternator. Our options were to write off the snowmobile and try to sell it, to always drive around with a pre-charged spare battery, or to attempt to fix the stator.
Consider our position:
- We have no mechanical experience or knowledge,
- The small engine repair guy left town, so we have nobody with mechanical expertise to go to for help,
- Replacing the stator coil on our type of snowmobile is considered a time-consuming and challenging repair (a “pain in the ass”, as the internet describes it),
- It’s a few hundred dollars for a new stator, and we’ve already dropped a few hundred dollars replacing the battery and rectifier/regulator,
- We don’t know for sure that the issue is the stator… and we’ve mis-diagnosed the problem twice already.
After much deliberation, Maciek decided he wanted to go for it, ordered a new stator coil from the internet, and spent a bunch of time reading the owner’s manual, online snowmobile repair forums, and watching YouTube videos. We packed up our tools, and headed to the small local shop (basically a garage behind the Pentecostal church).
After the first few hours, we had managed to burrow our way through various snowmobile parts to access the stator. Getting the stator cover off was quite the challenge, and I’ll admit that I didn’t think we were going to make it for a while there. Once we finally got into the stator, changing the coil was reasonably straightforward. The old stator coil had some melted zipties and what looked like some burnt copper wire, so it seemed like we might be on the right track.
Then the long re-assembly process began. By this point it was pushing midnight, so we called it a day, and Maciek went back a few days later to finish putting the snowmobile back together. He also had to reverse the wires on the “crankshaft position sensor”, which fortunately he had read about on an online forum, otherwise it wouldn’t have worked and we would have had no idea why.
And the verdict?
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…..
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It works! Our snowmobile works again! We fixed it!