The Grizzly Lodge in British Columbia Relies on AMSOIL

This sled is part of a cooperative effort between AMSOIL and Grizzly Lodge. We wanted to torture a snowmobile, and there’s no better way to do that than embed it in a rental fleet and put it in the mountains. A day in the life of a rental sled here specifically, they put on a pile of trail miles going down to our staging area which varies from 20 to 30 kilometers away to pick clients up. Clients are strapping their big bags on the back of these things, hauling their bags up here back up the trail so they’re running hot sometimes.

Next morning it’s up the mountain and into the mountains on the pin all the time. People like to ride hard, and they seem to like to ride rental sleds even harder. We also use them to tow each other up and down the hill sometimes when we have to deliver a bunch of rental sleds to our staging area. We don’t have the space to keep them all in a heated shop, so they all live outside.

We have often minus 35 in the wintertime. That means a lot of cold starts so lubrication is extremely important. If the sled fails, that’s something we don’t want to see. If it fails on the trail or if it fails in the mountain, either way it’s inconveniencing the customer.

And, basically, we need to find a way to get another sled up to them or they need to find a way to get back down to us, and it costs them a day of riding. So when you’ve come for three nights and two days riding and one of those days is taken up by rescuing a machine out of the backcountry, we really want to avoid those things at all cost. So it’s really, really important to us to keep them running in as top-notch condition as we can keep them. All of our rentals take a great deal of abuse during the season, but we specifically made sure this sled got most of the abuse.

Grizzly Lodge has rented this sled. They’ve guided on it. They’ve done all kinds of terrible things to it. We’re going to take it apart.

We’re going to show you how great Interceptor performed under those extreme conditions. You can see these are moving all the way open and then all the way closed which indicates that the power valves are free and working. The cylinder head looks beautiful. There’s no sign of any major carbon deposits on there.

There’s a little bit of coloration around the exhaust port but, other than that, it looks really good. So we’re checking the rings, and the rings are free, indicating there’s no carbon buildup in the lands. The pistons look good. You can see the skirts are not scuffed.

We’re going to check the rod bearings and make sure that there’s no axial play, there’s no lateral movement of the rod bearings. Crank still turns freely so everything looks good as far as the rod bearings go. I mean, the cross hatches are still in the cylinder. There’s no excess carbon depositing on the crowns.

It’s a very, very thin layer of carbon which is normal. You can tell that it’s thin because of the fuel wash bands on top of the piston. It gives you kind of an idea of how thick that carbon is and it’s very, very thin. So that’s a good sign.

Under crowns of the pistons don’t show any excess staining, and generally that’s a sign of how much heat that piston is seeing. Oil without enough detergency will generally put a black stain on the bottom of that piston. We’re not seeing that here. Overall I’d say this engine for a field engine with this amount of time on it, this thing looks good.