Publisher's Note: Welcome to our 40th edition of Tech Tips Tuesday on "Essential ATV Maintenance Tips for Peak Performance".  We'll be re-publishing an edition of AMSOIL Tech Tips for you every Tuesday.  Click on the Blog Category "Tuesday Tech Tips" to see everything published to-date.

Essential ATV Maintenance Tips for Peak Performance

John Gardner: When the going gets tough, the tough go off-roading. Welcome to this AMSOIL Tech Tip. Well, folks, it's all in a name: ATV, all-terrain vehicle.

That about says it all. It's going everywhere, and it's in some rough environments, so it needs service just like anything else. And you can see our service checklist here. We go down here, and we got our engine oil. Now, we covered that in another tech tip, but they do have pretty cool kits here. You can see it's got the oil, the filter, the O-ring, everything you want in these kits to take care of the oil. One click of the button, no trips to the parts store, you're all set.

But in this Tech Tip, we're talking about the actual differential and the transmission, and that needs attention too. And AMSOIL has us covered. I want you to look at this here. You actually have a whole bunch of gears going inside of there, which is the transmission separate from the oil on these machines. And then you have an actual differential. Now, the differential, we're talking about a pinion, we're talking about a ring gear, we're talking about a lot of friction and a lot of issues going on inside of there if you don't use good quality oil.

You can see right here the actual CVT transmission. That's up to 270° in these machines. Now, in a differential, we're talking about 280°, and that's a little differential. There's not a lot of fluid in there. You guys have to build a robust product for that.

Len Groom: You do, 'cause that is hot. That is extremely hot. These things do not hold much; some of these hold as little as 5 ounces of oil. That is a tiny amount of oil that you're asking to do a very large amount of work. And what's the first thing you do to your machine when you get it? You modify it. You put bigger tires on it. You put a lift kit in it, all adding stress onto that differential. So, the product needs to be built very, very strongly.

You've got to start with good building blocks, and that's going to be the base oils, high-end synthetics, proper amount of additives. Right, we need the wear protection. We want the rust and corrosion. We need all of those good things in there, plus we're dealing with that heat. So, our detergency and our antioxidants have to be where they need to be.