How to Perform a Snowmobile Track Adjustment

Hi. I’m Len Groom. Welcome to Tech Tips. There’s a lot of question out there about how to properly adjust my snowmobile track, so today we’ll show you how to do it.

The first thing you need to do is lift the snowmobile off the ground. Since the track will spin for this, make sure that it is securely hoisted. The next thing we want to do is loosen the rear axle. There’s going to be a bolt on either side, depending on the snowmobile.

You need to get both of those bolts loose. You can’t do it one at a time. Generally, you will have to put a wrench on each side and loosen the axle. The next thing you need to do is check your current tension.

Is the track too tight? Is the track too loose? We need to make a determination of whether or not it needs to be adjusted. Once you’ve made your determination, you can go ahead and loosen your adjuster bolts.

As you can see here, you need to back the jam nuts off on both sides. Give them a little spin; get them out of the way. As you can see here, the track on this snowmobile needs to be tightened. To tighten the track, you need to go on the bolts on either side of the axle, turn those clockwise or tighten them.

Keep your eye on the track. You want to look at the distance from the track to the slide. As you tighten it, you’ll see the track start to rise up towards that slide. That means you’re getting close.

So you need to make a determination at this point of how tight you want to go. Give it a few turns on either side, and then you want to kind of check with your hand. At that point, if we feel we’re close, we’re going to take a measurement 16 inches in front of the rear axle is what the book says for this model. Once we’ve determined that spot, we want to push down with about 10 pounds of pressure.

And you’re looking for 3/8 to 1/2 inch of distance between the track and the rear slide while applying 10 pounds of pressure. You can guess at 10 pounds. In the case, we actually have a tool that will let us know that we’re pushing down with 10 pounds of pressure. We made a small adjustment.

We’re going to check it again, make sure that were close. It looks like we are in spec at this point. You want to move over and do the same procedure on the other side of the snowmobile. Once we’ve determined that the track is within spec, we want to make sure that the axle is square and that the track is aligned.

A quick check would be to measure from your adjustment block to a fixed point on your slide. In this case, you can see we’re using that window in the rail as a reference. You need to make sure that the track is aligned. And, to do that, you take a look at the position of the track clip to the actual plastic slide of the snowmobile.

First thing you need to do is start it up, and you need to rotate the track. So we’re going to rotate the track here. That will take into account the adjustment we just made, and the track will find its own alignment. In this case, you look at the position of the track clip to the slide.

What we can see here is that the track has shifted in one direction. There’s more space on the close side versus the far side, so we need to push the track away from us. Now, the angle of the axle is going to do that for us. We can either tighten this close side or we can loosen the far side.

In this case, we’ve chosen to loosen the far side of the axle. That means that the axle angle is going to shift, and that is going to push the track away from us. And that’s what we want. We make our adjustment.

We’re going to make sure we rotate the track again. We’re going to check our distance between our track clip and our slide. As you can see, there’s an equal distance. That means that our track is aligned.

At this point, what you could do is go ahead and run your jam nuts down. Make sure those are tight. Get both sides. Then you need to remember to tighten your axle bolts.

Once the axle bolts are tight, that axle can’t shift anymore. Sometimes people forget to do this. You want to make sure you get that axle bolt good and tight. Check both sides just to be sure.

There you have it. Those are the basic steps required to adjust your track. Thanks for watching. We’ll see you next time.