Bought first argo. Questions follow.

[Coast2Coast]

I just bought my first argo tonight. It's pretty much the first one I've ever seen up close other than a new XTi that I saw in a local honda dealer. It's a 1996 conquest. When I was looking it over I noticed all the chains were loose as could be. I figured oh well how expensive could chain be? Well it's $2500CAD to purchase all the chains and sprockets... wow that's half what I paid for the machine. Does anyone know of a bulk Canadian source of the RC50-2 Chain? Is there an industrial supplier that has the right sprockets or do I have to get those from argo? Is there something I'm missing about chain tensioners? It just has two teflon pads squeezed together by a spring on each chain. The spring is pretty much completely relaxed and the chains are squeezed really close together, and they feel like the spring provides zero tension on them when moved by hand. Also the idler chain up front is pretty loose, and I feel the chains slapping the floor on both sides under my feet when I steer. It seems really jerky when moving around, not like in youtube videos I've watched (I've seen all of them lol). It feels like it needs to be babied to prevent some kind of destruction. The machine is in good shape overall it just needs some tlc. At least none of the bearings feel worn. The two plugs in the tub in the back are missing, anyone have any suggestions for replacements? It came with those plastic tracks, but the guy couldn't find the pins to hold them together, anyone know what size steel rod I should buy for those? The bildge pump doesn't turn on, or at least I can't hear it, is it really quiet? Or does it need to be submerged to work with a float switch like a boat? I imagine its just seized.

Sorry for the long post, just excited to get out in the new machine. The ice here in Alberta is really thin this year and flooded so I won't take my truck on it for ice fishing. I figured it'd be a good time to finally pick up an argo after thinking about it for the past couple years.

[curtisbyrne]

Ok first of all, the chains are most likely stretched and if you keep running those chains they will tear up your sprockets and they are not cheap either.if the chains are loose even with the tensioner on them the chains are most likely worn, that's the same problem I have right now they might look like good chains still but if stretched no good sorry. Steering, the brake pads are probably worn or low brake fluid, the brake pads are down by the transmission and you have to pull 2 cotter pins to get them out,the brake master cylinders are on the top of the tranny check for lots of brake fluid. If brake pads and fluid are good there may be air in the system.for the tracks you can just find some track pins on eBay or just around town or even on an Argo dealer or website.dont know much about bilge pumps sorry! The conquests are very tough and rugged machines and they should have a 20 hp Kawasaki. Good luck with your Argo
Curtis

[ARGOJIM]

Chains sound whooped, those chain tensioners are more a chain take up, wore chains will slap the floorboard with that style. Put your hand on the bilge feel for vibration it is very quiet , you may hear a slight whir, if not the 3 amp fuse on the dash feeds it.

Seat time and you'll look like youtube vids.

[Coast2Coast]

Update. It's a 1999 conquest not a 1996. I bought 50' of chain off Ebay for $350, still looking for sprockets. Ran it around today in the snow, about 12" of snow. It runs pretty well, just the slapping of the chains every time I steer one way or the other drives me crazy. I did find the adjustment for the idler chains and tightened them up at least. The front chains are ridiculously loose. It doesn't get around so well in the snow with the warn out 22" runamucks but I didn't expect much from them. Not so bad in a straight line but try to turn or even slightly adjust your direction and you stop. That's at 3psi, maybe it would be better at lower pressure. But those tubes are barely holding on as it is I imagine. I removed a tube from one of the tires today that wasn't holding air. After reseating the bead I found it only has a slow leak or two out the bead and only at lower pressures. Easy fix with some bead glue, or tire slime. I will continue removing tubes as required until there are none left. Took a video of the worn out chains.

https://youtu.be/A2uMcwZ0gME

[curtisbyrne]

I seen the video and I have the same problem with all my chains too they are all loose and slap on the floor pans and it is annoying! If front chains are loose can you tighten them or just get new ones ?

[Coast2Coast]

I removed the tube from the last leaking tire and sealed the beads with green slime today. I just put it on the beads just before I pop them on, I don't put it in the tire. The bead seating areas of the wheels are all pitted from water sitting in them for 19 years. One bottle does like 50 tires. I put the tracks on and drove around the yard, wife got a few seconds of video before her phone died. You can hear the chains slap if you listen carefully when I turn.

https://youtu.be/93V5O2x-nU0

Turns out it is a 1997, according to the local argo dealership going by the serial number. You don't really know what you get when you buy off a farmer. I replaced the bilge pump today with one I found at Candian tire for $25. The original one was seized badly and had a hole burnt in the plastic casing where the motor windings must have heated up when somebody switched it on after it seized, the wiring also melted the loom on it's way up to the fuse panel I'm assuming judging by the way it's melted. I greased the bearings outside the tub but the inside ones still had grease hanging off like they were just done before I bought it. I see that the inside grease zerk was overgreased on one of them and the cork gasket split and grease is coming out of it. Wonder it it's worth the trouble to replace the gasket or if I should just keep greasing that one to keep the water out. Now I was thinking of taking it to the self spray car wash and spraying all the crap out from under the engine and push it back to the rear end where I can remove it. It has a lifetime worth of oil and grease saturated plantlife and seeds right next to the bilge pump and under the engine where you can't reach. I went ahead and ordered all new sprockets and a new drive belt and throttle cable today. The sprockets are warn way beyond the point where I used to replace my sprockets on the racing machines. I checked the brake fluid and it looks like hell, is it correct that we need to use dot5 brake fluid in argos? That stuff is 4X the price of regular brake fluid. Hurts when you need to flush the whole system.

To answer your question, curtisbyrne, there is no adjustment for the chains driving the front wheels as far as I can tell. Must be replaced or the quick fix is to put a half-link in the chain but I've never done that as it's not a long term solution and can overwear a chain and cause it to break which usually meant breaking something far more expensive than a chain on other machines I've run.

[curtisbyrne]

Nice vid sound like everything is working fine!

[Coast2Coast]

The ironically named conquest has pretty much taken over my life now, wife has been complaining that we never do anything. I thought back and realised I've spent pretty much all of my spare time over the past 6 weeks working on this machine lol. She's right, so I took her fishing this weekend - with the argo lol.



I've seen on other argo photos there is a different style tensioner than mine. It sits on the bottom and has auto indexing cam that pushes up on the bottom of the chain to take up the slack. Does anyone know if one can swap the old style springy tensioners with that other style?

I've been having bad luck with the tires. Every day another tire or two goes flat. I pull the tubes out and try to reseat them. Once I pull the tubes out, they have no leaks whatsoever other than leaking through the outside facing bead. My tire slime bead sealing trick didn't work out after I started riding on them. So I went and bought a can of the actual proffessional cancer causing chemical soup bead sealer. So far it's worked on all but the first tire that I tried it on, but I used it sparingly on that tire, the rest of them I slathered it on like a madman and they are still holding! Also noticed the brake cooling fan duct was disconnected from the fan housing, cool, I put it back on.

Yesterday I had it stall out on me when we left at the end of the ice fishing trip. It's done this a few times before, just randomly stall out usually soon after I had it shut off or idling for a while. The only thing that seems to help is to let it sit a while then it fires back up and might run again for the rest of the day, or stall again once or twice more before running the rest of the day. I'll tell you it's un-nerving when it stalls on you in the middle of a slush hole on a 15km wide lake and you've got a 10km walk back to the truck in -10 weather if it won't start again. It's getting fuel to the carb fine. I took the carb apart and cleaned everything out last night - to be tested. I thought maybe I had old gas and the sticking intake valve problem since one of the spark plugs is always soaking wet, but the pushrods and valves were all fine. It has red dyed farm gas in it from the previous owner. I syphoned it all out today and replaced with new gas and sea-foam. I adjusted the valve clearance. The previous owner told me he adjusted the valve clearences recently, but they were all tight and had zero clearance so I set them all to .010". Hopefully that solves my wet spark plug and low compression syndrome. Oh yeah, I did a half assed compression test without following proper procedure. Got 60psi on one cylinder and 90 on the other. Hopefully it was just those over tightened valves sticking open. There's also an electrical gremlin causing the electrical system to randomly shut off when the key is turned to ON and it's not running. The brake fan will cut off and on like there's a wire shorting somewhere. I'm not sure if that's causing the machine to stall or not when it does its stalling.

I'm tackling the engine running issues now, it seemed to have about half the power on the way home that it did at the beginning of the trip yesterday. Once I'm done with that, figuring out how to make it track straight instead of having to turn right ever 5 seconds.

[curtisbyrne]

I don't think you can switch tensioners. I also hate the old style

[Aahicnow]

Not sure on this but i also put a fresh tank of fuel in mine this weekend mixed with the recommended amount of sea foam and i am loosing power as well, the last two tanks of gas without the seafoam and it ran great. Will have to burn this tank off and see if the next tank of gas is better. I know one thing i can sure smell the sea foam burning. As to the tracking mine does that when i have a low tire on one of the corners.

[glen1971]

Not sure on this but i also put a fresh tank of fuel in mine this weekend mixed with the recommended amount of sea foam and i am loosing power as well, the last two tanks of gas without the seafoam and it ran great. Will have to burn this tank off and see if the next tank of gas is better. I know one thing i can sure smell the sea foam burning. As to the tracking mine does that when i have a low tire on one of the corners.

Are you running premium fuel or 87 octane? Most new small engines don't like the ethanol blends of fuel, especially if you aren't running it every day...

[Aahicnow]

Only run Premium in all my small engines, find the ethanol does nasty things to small engines

[Coast2Coast]

I've been running premium too, well I am now, this is the first time I've put fuel in it. But all the other machines get premium. The pump at my local shell has a sticker that says "V-power - 0% ethanol" so I pay the extra for that. Theoretically premium should have no impact on the performance of a low compression engine designed to run on regular.

Anyone know if this lateral play in the rocker arms is normal?

https://youtu.be/-JdY_rXASW4

I had 3 flat tires this time, one I repaired previously and didn't use enough bead sealer, 2 that had tubes. I removed them and applied bead sealer, like a mad man. Some good entertaining videos of me overapplying bead sealer and trying to put a schrader valve in unsuccessfully with one hand:

https://youtu.be/5wewXD5mjbU

https://youtu.be/vt-_yGqktBY

I took the machine out tonight for a test run for about an hour. Things changed since last trip: Valve clearances adjusted, carb disassembled and cleaned, changed old farm gas out for new premium gas mixed with seafoam, sprayed seafoam on valves while I had the covers off, sprayed it into combustion chambers through spark plug holes while cranking it over for a few seconds, let sit, etc. Dissected the wiring harness, reconnected a broken connector on the voltmeter so it works again, installed new split wire loom to replace the tattered old stuff, checked all the fuses and terminations. Checked stator output - normal.

The electrical gremlin I can't seem to reproduce showed itself as soon as I turned the key to the on position when getting ready to load the argo onto the trailer to leave the house. Everything just died, no fan, voltmeter, nothing. I turned the key off and on a few times, wiggled some wires. When I pounded on the dash it came back to life again. The only thing that I can think is that one of the stone age looking fuses is causing it. They all have continuity but some of them look pretty sketchy. So I'll be replacing all of them whenever I can find my big box-o-fuses I've got hiding somewhere.

Overall outlook from tonights ride - no major improvements from last time I ran her. A little dissapointed after all the work. The temp rose to +2 degrees, and the snow turned heavy and packy. It was snowballing on the tracks, and getting between the tires and tracks making them smack the hull all the time so I didn't go very far. New issue, the engine is surging constantly. It's worst when it's cold started, doesn't do it once you get on the throttle and start moving beyond about 1/4 throttle. But rev down and cruise slow and it surges up and down all the time. Stop and idle it surges constantly like it wants to die. I noticed last night when I was putting the throttle linkages back on that the governor arm was catching on the throttle arm above it and not able to move. I had bent it when I removed it, I found I had to bend it up to remove the carb so that I could disconnect the wire going from the governor arm to the throttle valve on the carb. Anyway I bent it back down after re-installing the carb but I noticed it doesn't move as freely as before. So I think my governor is bouncing the throttle because it can't move as freely as before. I'll have to look into it. I've never worked on a governor equipped engine before, but with it turned off, the governor arm keeps the throttle pretty much wide open. I noticed also the twist throttle got SUPER touchy and you just slightly twist it and it instantly jumps up in RPM. I need to take the carb back off and clean it again. I have a pretty bad track record with carbs. I don't think I've ever cleaned one and noticed a dam bit of difference afterwards. For sure not in the 4 old 3 wheeler carbs and one john deer lawn tractor carb I cleaned last year. I might just toss it in the wifes ultrasonic cleaner tonight and leave it overnight before cleaning it to see if it helps at all. But it seems like if they work they work and if they don't buy a new one from what I've seen. I think once they get 20 years worth of scale deposited on tiny passagways you can't touch with any physical or chemical means they will never work right again.

10 minutes into the trip tonight it died on me. Just stalled and wouldn't start back up as it seems to do once or twice per trip I take it out. I took the time to change the spark plugs finally to some new ones I ordered online. It had CJ14 champion plugs and I changed them out to the recommended NGK plugs, don't remember the code, but they're the short ones like the CJ14s. The old plugs were both dry this time, that's a first. The rearward plug had a white insulator, I've never seen one come out so white. So fuel is not getting in, it's running lean as hell by the looks of that. More carb cleaning to come.

Machine still turns left all day. I've gone over half way through a set of right-side brake pads just in testing over the 5 hours I've run it since I got it. I hit the left steering arm a total of 6 times today over the course of an hour lol. When I hit it the wife said "what does that lever do?" lol cause she hadn't seen me steer with it. I noticed the idler chain on the right is tight and the one on the left is loose. I could not make the tension between the two even. This might be the problem with the steering issue since every time the right side makes one revolution the loose left side will make less than one revolution.

Tommorrow is my last day before I go back to work for a week. Will try and make some progress. My 40' of new chain arrived in the mail yesterday. Not touching that project until I know I can get the rest of the machine tuned up.

Was considering if I made the right choice for a remote hunting machine today. We already go where most never reach before we even unload the trailer. Can this machine really be reliable enough to get us back from places a person couldn't even walk out of?? I haven't had a single day yet that I haven't said "oh **** if I can't get this running again we're walking for the rest of the day..." Is there any hope? I'd like to carry some hunting equipment and food on top of all the tools and spare parts!

Cheers

[ARGOJIM]

Pull the main engine plug and see if it's greened or has a bad end in it (big connector), also check what the ground bar looks like as it may need replacing after all these years.

[Coast2Coast]

Cleaned carb again with ultrasonic cleaner, working much better now. Idle is way up now and won't shift. Anyone know which screw is which?



Which one is the one you turn all the way in then 1 3/4 turns out? The one on the right has a black plastic piece over it and it can only turn 1/4 turn CCW or CW. What the heck is that about? I can't make any sense of the manual, all of the pictures are crap.

Squeeling brake on right side fixed by removing and applying brake grease to the back of the pads. Interesting I have to remove the calipers to remove the pads, I had though you could just pull those pins and pull the pads, that sucks. Now I have to rob a hex bit and 2" extension from my impact socket set to keep in my tool kit in the argo for this job.

Tires all held air for the first time today. Epic win.

Cheers.