Shop Talk: Polaris RANGER Ride Experience Ep. 64

Pat McArdle: Hey Pat and Chris back for another episode of Shop Talk where today we got a Ranger XP in the shop. Chris, what are we covering off on today?

Chris Hendricks: Well, as you guys know Polaris Ranger is the hardest working and smoothest riding as you can tell from Pat's awesome fancy belt buckle. Today's episode's all about that. We're going to talk about how we bring ride tuning to life on the Ranger product line.

Pat McArdle: Alright, so we've got a Ranger XP behind us today and today we're going to talk about all the steps that we go through in how we tune the ride capability of these vehicles. So things like the suspension, the seats, the wheels and tires and even accessories and how those fit in. So Chris, what are we starting off with here?

Chris Hendricks: Well, we're going to start off with the suspension. So we brought a bunch of components here. We've got springs, shocks and total assemblies. I want to kind of go through all of them, talk about what they do and how Polaris really fine-tunes these.

Pat McArdle: Yeah, absolutely. So I think if you guys look in front of Chris, we got a couple different springs sitting here. So the ones that are painted black are actually production front springs and rear springs. And then we've got a different prototype for a rear spring right between the two. And what you'll quickly pick up on besides the fact that these are, you know, painted differently is that you've got a different winding strategy here where this is actually a dual rate spring on the rear where these coils on the wire are wound closer together than these. We also have the ability to control the wire diameter and control the spring rate of these windings. So if we swap out this prototype and compare it to the front spring, you'll notice that this has actually got a much smaller wire than the rear because it's a lighter spring. It doesn't need to hold up as much weight on the front of the Ranger here with the lighter spring versus the larger one on the rear. Maybe just to back up a step, what the spring's actually doing is holding the weight of the vehicle up. So if that's not clear, you know, if you remove the spring out of a vehicle it'll basically collapse down to its lowest position of that suspension travel. The spring is really there to hold it up, right? So we always want to make sure that we calibrate the the spring, the the force of the spring to match the weight of a given vehicle. So whether that's the three seat like we got behind us or we'll generally run a heavier spring on a crew. Um, so the cool part of this is as we iterate and go through the tuning process, you'll see different winding wire sizes, different spring rates, different diameters of wire, all that have to package in, you know, to be able to fit around a shock, but that can hold up the corner of the vehicle.

Chris Hendricks: Yeah, and I don't think most people would realize how much goes into a spring, right? It just looks like some metal that's wrapped around. But really what makes Polaris unique is what we do with this in fine-tuning it. And as Pat mentioned, it's having the right spring package for every vehicle from a pretty lightweight two seat 570 all the way up to a pretty darn heavy vehicle with a six seat Ranger XD 1500. We've got a unique shock and spring package, you know, for each of those corners of the vehicles that is optimized to the weight.

Pat McArdle: Yeah, for sure. All right. So next up, we've got examples of both a rear and a front twin tube style emulsion shock. So these are, you know, fully fully built from the factory but non-rebuildable. Basically, if you ever need to replace this, you pitch it and put a new one in. We've got adjustable spring height here on the bottom. So you can see that rotates and moves up as you go. You got five different positions that you can adjust that to. You've got a spring perch that sits on top of that as well as a spring perch here on the top. We also have a rubber J bumper that's on the shock shaft. That's going to be there to prevent the shock from having a harsh bottom out when it goes to its full stroke. Basically, on the on the return side, doesn't really do anything. It's only there for the compression side. And and I guess again, backing up what does the shock actually do? It's really slowing down the suspension travel in each corner. So in if this if it if there was no shock and only a spring if you hit a bump, you'd see the vehicle just constantly do this until it eventually slowed down. With a shock in place, you'll see it move dampen out and kind of return to its home position a lot quicker. So when you think of a shock, think of it as a thing that's smoothing out the suspension as it goes through the travel both in compression and in rebound as that wheel's going up or down. Other things that are on this, so this is a twin tube style emulsion shock. So as you think about that, unlike some of maybe the Razer shocks that we've talked about in previous episodes, this one has a mixture of gas and oil on the inside. We'll talk about that a little bit more in a minute.

Chris Hendricks: Yeah. A quick tip with this preload adjustment is the most common use cases we see are if you're going to run a plow for all of winter, you get that extra weight on the front of your vehicle. Go up a couple notches in preload. Make sure the left and right are the same level of notches. So they're symmetrical. The other one that's really common in like an A setting is if people are running pellet feeders or you've got weight in the back of your Ranger very consistently. You can go up a couple notches that you can maintain that ride height and have a really comfortable ride.

Pat McArdle: Yeah, for sure. I think I see guys with sprayers all the time, right? Bunch of bunch of weight in the back. Yeah. And one other tip for you guys at home, when you're going to adjust these these preload these these spring preload adjusters, make sure you jack the vehicle up so that the wheel's off the ground and take take the weight of the vehicle off that corner. It makes it a heck of a lot easier because you're only going against the the spring tension versus the spring and the weight of that corner of the vehicle. So just quick reminder on that one. Now the other shock we've got here may look a little bit different to you guys and this is actually a calibration and tuning shock. So this is kind of a special one that you'll never see in production but that we happen to have here at Polaris. So the first thing you may notice on the bottom if I spin this cap off is that you've got a Shrader valve that's going to allow you to re-pressurize this shock and add nitrogen pressure back into it. You won't see that on a stock one cuz they're fully sealed. And the other big difference here, you can see that there's an end cap that you can actually spin off of this to be able to pull the whole shock as or shaft assembly out. So you can get at the valving and there's actually some springs inside these shocks that basically help with the pressure that that valving is going to move at. So think of the valve in the shock as how much force it takes for this shock to start slowing things down and how fast the shock moves and how much resistance it's going to apply as it's slowing.

Chris Hendricks: Yeah. The real benefit of this is that it allows us to fine-tune and sort of guess and check. So we can go out and do a ride and handling evaluation in the morning sometimes and give feedback to the suspension team, they can turn around a rebuilt vehicle with optimized shock and spring package that we can go test again sometimes in the same afternoon. So it allows us to be a lot faster as we're developing and going through the ride and handling calibration process.

Pat McArdle: All right. So now we've got the fully assembled versions here. You got the springs, you got the shocks, you got the preload, you got the J bumper in here. This is kind of everything in one from the shock spring assembly that we bolt into the corner of the vehicle. This is where the legendary ride and handling really, you know, a lot of it comes from on the ride side. You got the spring to hold the weight of the vehicle up. You got the shock to kind of slow that motion down and tune it in for every vehicle we make in the lineup. All the way from the, you know, smallest lightest two-seaters up to the biggest heaviest six-seaters. Now the nice part is on these Ranger shocks, the shocks are not rebuildable. And I actually kind of like that cuz when it's time to swap them out, you basically pull this assembly out of the vehicle. You relieve the spring pressure out of it. You basically compress the spring, pull this plate off, and then you remove the spring, put that on your new shock, put everything back together, bolt it in. So you don't have to worry about oil going all over the place. You don't have to worry about pressurizing it. Get the right nitrogen pressure. Like there's more involved on some of the high performance shocks we use on Razer and some of our crossover vehicles. But the beauty of these is that we can really tune these per application. Like Chris said, we can get the right valving, we can get the right springs, we can get the right, you know, main kind of tender spring or dual rate spring setup on these if we have it. And we calibrate it for each version of Ranger so you get that nice plush ride quality. And we generally rely on having a, you know, a really stiff vehicle frame so that the shock and and and spring can do their work at the four corners. And I think that's really the takeaway as you think about Ranger is we're not using the really high-end Fox or Walker Evans shocks that you'll see on some of our other products. The secret sauce is really in how we calibrate all these things to work together on a specific vehicle.

Chris Hendricks: All right guys. So we told you we were going to bring out the rear suspension setup from a Trail Boss, show it off to you guys. So check out these big bad boys. Pat, can you explain what these self-leveling shocks do, kind of how they work in that Trail Boss?

Pat McArdle: Yeah, absolutely. So we've got the rear low-leveling shocks here. These are some cool technology that you get on Trail Boss models from the factory. They can actually be, I believe, swapped in on any Ranger XP if you really want to. But what's cool is that they are really good for dynamic loading. So if you go a lot from unloaded to loaded rear box or not trailering to trailering where you got a bunch of tongue weight. So one of the things that people often get thrown off on the first time they have one of these Trail Boss units or maybe older models that had this style of suspension is they'd load up the rear box with a, you know, a bunch of firewood or something else and they'd see the Ranger squat down. Well, basically that is normal behavior. That's exactly what we expect to happen. And as you drive down the trail and the shock starts moving up and down a little bit, it'll actually start to pump itself back up and relevel itself. Now, when you get to the spot where you're unloading that firewood, you dump it all out of your Ranger, your machine's going to be sitting a little high in the back. And again, as you drive down the trail, it'll level itself back down. So it's always trying to get itself back to what that stock ride height is no matter how much weight you got in the back. So if you're going for applications where you're loading and unloading a lot or trailering and not trailering where you got a bunch of tongue weight coming on on and off, these self-leveling rear shocks are a really nice feature to have.

Chris Hendricks: And they come stock on just the Trail Boss, right?

Pat McArdle: Yep. These come on the Trail Boss. Really sweet for if you're doing a bunch of work. Load the vehicle up, it'll squat down. As soon as you take off, it'll readjust itself. Let's move on to the other side of the table here. We've got some stabilizer bars sitting in front of me.

Chris Hendricks: Yep. So what these basically do is you've got one for the front of the vehicle, one for the rear of the vehicle. This is what ties the left side and the right side of the suspension together. So if you think about a Ranger with independent front and rear suspension, this is what ties those sides together. And this is how we control the level of body roll that you have in the vehicle. Pat, what I'm hoping you can talk through is how we really optimize this through our calibration process.

Pat McArdle: Absolutely. So, you know, we just talked about, you know, kind of coil springs that go on the shocks. As you think about a stabilizer bar, think of it like a torsional spring. So one that twists. So as one wheel goes up on one corner, it's going to start to lift that stabilizer bar and twist it against the other corner. And then that twisting motion is going to try and force the other wheel to match whether you're going up or down. So when you look at the bars that we've got on the table here, the ones closest to us are unpainted. These are actually prototype bars. The ones closest to you guys are painted. Those are production bars. And what you'll see if I if we kind of tilt up the front bar, which is the smaller of the two, the one closest to me is a little wider here because it's actually got a larger diameter steel bar that it's made out of. So this is going to be a stiffer bar. It's going to resist that roll of the vehicle more and it's going to maybe give you, I'll say, a little harsher of a ride quality when you're going through chatter or things that have uneven terrain. Whereas this softer or smaller diameter front bar is going to allow a little more compliance. That wheel is going to be able to move a little more before the other side catches up to it. The the prototype bar for the the rear is exactly the opposite. We've actually got a smaller bar here than what we ended up going with in production because we needed a little stiffer bar for the weight of the vehicle. The other thing that you guys will notice is these extra pieces. That's actually going to prevent this bar from shuttling side to side. So when you look at the mount where this goes on, these two features actually hold that thing from shuttling side to side. And when that shuttling occurs, you can often hear it in the vehicle and it can wear the paint off and it looks a little weird. So that feature really helps eliminate that.

Chris Hendricks: We want to just demonstrate what we mean by a torsion spring and what the stabilizer bar is actually doing in the vehicle. So we're going to demonstrate. Think about this is I'm the passenger side tire on the vehicle and Pat's the driver's side. And it's like we're almost trying to wrestle. So if we were trying to turn this against each other and fight each other and then as the suspension goes the other way, we're going to fight the other direction.

Pat McArdle: Right, so as you think about this, this thing's laying across the vehicle basically like this, you know, moving up and down in unison. But it actually has, you know, a little bit if you think about it this way, a little bit of twist to it. So imagine my hands are that bar. As one side comes up, it's going to try and twist the other side to match it. So again, I'm exaggerating how much they can move, but it's like little motion here and then it starts to pick up the other side. A little motion down starts driving the other side the other way. So think about that as you think about a stabilizer bar. It's the torsional motion of that thing twisting that's actually resisting from one side to the other. And that's what we're really fine-tuning through this ride calibration process is the thicker the material that you use, the stronger the spring force is and that changes your ride.

Chris Hendricks: Yeah. Exactly. Okay. So if you think thicker bar is stiffer, a smaller diameter bar is often called softer and it's going to allow more compliance side to side. So you're going to get a little more travel before it's fighting the other side to match it. All right. So before we jump into the next section, now that we're near a vehicle, I just want to show you where some of those parts are located. So this is the front wheel. We're in the front corner. Obviously the shock is right behind it. Springs wrapped around the shock. We talked about that, uh, you know, adjustable spring preload collar right here in the bottom. The stabilizer bar is here, uh, connects to this drop link which goes down to the upper air arm on this Ranger. So everything's pretty easy to access right in the front. The rear is about the same, just flipped around to the back axle.

Pat McArdle: All right, the next thing that we're going to talk about on the vehicle is the impact that tires have on ride and handling. This is one that was really surprising to me as I learned a lot more about off-road vehicles, just how much goes into a tire.

Chris Hendricks: Yeah, absolutely. So as we think about tires, there's a lot of things to consider. You know, I think a lot of people will will talk about a ply rating or, you know, a ply count. Often it's listed on the sidewall as PR or or or plies. That doesn't necessarily equate to like the old school there was actually that many layers of stuff in the tire. It's an equivalency on the new modern tires. So the higher that count typically you're going to have the stiffer the sidewall of the tire is the easy way to think about it. So a two-ply rated tire is going to have a much more compliant sidewall. An eight-ply rated tire like this Trecker we've got here is going to have a stiffer sidewall. So it's not going to flex as much as you change the air pressure. So there's always a decal in the back of your box that gives you the recommended pressures for your machine. But what you'll notice often times is that's a lot lower than what you'd see in like your car or truck. And that's because we're actually using the tire as a compliance member in the suspension. So we rely on the fact that the tire has a bit of give to it. So if you ever run, you know, I'll say a different tire that's got a really really stiff sidewall, you may notice that your machine is riding a little rougher, a little stiffer even at the same air pressure or you may notice that somebody, you know, cranked up the air pressure on you and, you know, and it's riding a little rougher. Go check that tire pressure and make sure it's not, you know, way higher than it needs to be. You know, oftentimes we'll see some applications where people are riding if you're in really loose terrains like sand or snow where people will drop pressures down to get a little more contact patch and flotation. Again, you know, if you do that, make sure you're not overloading the vehicle, going at really high speeds or that you're maintaining at least the pressures that are on that label so that you can do that with your vehicle.

Pat McArdle: Yeah. So like Pat mentioned, this is in a sticker in your box on your vehicle. It'll also be in the owner's manual. And you'll notice there's a different section in the owner's manual for some of the different vehicles with different tire pressure ratings cuz those vehicle weights are different.

Chris Hendricks: Yeah. So oftentimes you'll see that maybe a three seat and a crew actually have different tire pressure guidelines. Uh it's because the crew weighs more and when you fully burden that vehicle the tires actually have to carry more load in each corner. So that's that's the reason why you'll often see especially on Rangers a higher tire pressure on the rear than the front because we have to count for all the cargo box weight and tongue weight that that vehicle can can be capable of even if you're not operating with that all the time. So yeah, the tire, huge part of the suspension. I think one of the other things we should probably talk about too is just tire sizes. So I think one of the things people often ask is how big of a tire can I put on my, you know, Ranger, my Razer, my whatever vehicle. And I think a couple of the things that are important to remember is that as you change the size of the tire, you typically also are changing the weight of the tire and the diameter as you go, you know, up or down in tire size. Now a couple of the common things that you're going to run into, if you go to too big of a tire, it's going to put more load on your drive line. So think the episodes we've done on clutches and belts. We've talked about that a little. But if you go to too big of a tire when you start out, you're putting a lot more load through that belt to get that vehicle moving. It's going to be much harder. You're probably going to wear that belt out faster or and be more likely to have a belt fatigue or failure over time. The other thing you run into especially on the front end is that you're actually going to start interfering with some of the plastic on this machine and and maybe not in the stock ride height, but as you think that tire goes up through its travel and through its steering, you're going to start to get points where that tire is actually going to contact either the body or a frame member depending on the model. So we generally, you know, recommend read your manual because different vehicles are a little different on this XP 1000. A 29 inch is a great tire size to maintain, you know, stock performance, ground clearance, and a good level of performance overall on this machine.

Pat McArdle: Yep. All right. Last thing we want to talk about on tires is just the tread pattern and how that can impact the ride. So you guys will notice that this tire in front of me and on this XP-1000 behind me is not the stock tire. These are from our Pro Armor catalog. These are the Trekker tires. These are designed specifically for harder packed surfaces and providing as quiet of an experience as possible. And we do that with how the tread is constructed on it. Pat, can you just show some of the differences in this tire and how that changes the ride?

Chris Hendricks: Yeah, absolutely. So we've got a pretty high tread to void ratio on this tire. So tread is the surface really that sticks up off the tire. The void is the valley between each one. And as you look at the gap between each of these treads and the voids, you can see that they actually vary a little bit between each surface. So that you don't get a constant drumming sound or a constant tone. It actually varies it to give you a more pleasant sounding experience. So it actually is perceived to sound a bit quieter and more pleasant in the tone that comes out of this tire. Especially when you're on, you know, a hard, you know, surface like a hard pressed dirt or a gravel, you know, where you're going higher speeds and then especially if you're in a fully cab vehicle where you're going to hear that that noise a little bit more.

Pat McArdle: Yeah. So we love these Pro Armor tires. Um, they're very specialized as you buy the accessory tires and we run them stock on the XP1000 with more of a general purpose Pro Armor tire.

Chris Hendricks: All right, Pat. So one of the pieces of feedback that I get from our customers and our dealers is that the seats in a Ranger can feel pretty stiff.

Pat McArdle: Yeah, let me jump in and explain that one to you, Chris. So I think one of the things that we think about as we look at seats and we go through the development is not just what does a seat feel like in a showroom floor when you're going between a Ranger and maybe another side by side, but it's what does that seat feel like for the whole day of operation and the whole lifetime of that vehicle? So as we think about it, we actually want that seat to be a little bit stiffer so that you're not pounding through and hitting the bottom seat pan as you go through a long day of work or a long day of of riding. And as the machine ages over time, right, you want that foam to stay in place. You don't want it to be like pounding down as softer materials often do. So we test a wide variety of durometer of foam in our seats to land on what we end up with. With this actually slightly stiffer material where it's still comfortable, keeps you firmly plastered in the seat as you're bouncing around going down the trail. You're letting the suspension do the work. You're not kind of translate that up into the foam that's going to change over time more than say the corners of the wheels with the springs and shocks and and stab bars that we showed earlier. So overall, we want that seat to actually be a little bit stiffer, not just for the showroom experience, but really for the real life experience that you're going to have when you're out riding.

Chris Hendricks: Yeah. And you'd never guess this but we are testing and calibrating the durometer of the foam in our seats the same way that we're testing different thicknesses of metal in the stabilizer bars. So a lot of the components on a Polaris Ranger are not as simple as they maybe seem. We're really calibrating them. We're testing a lot of varieties of them. Now Pat, there's a couple other things in the inside of this vehicle that are going to contribute to the ride. We talked about a bunch of them on our episode of Shop Talk where we launched the 2025 Rangers. What are some of your favorites on the inside?

Pat McArdle: Yeah, I'll tell you a couple things that are my favorites. When I think about the driveline modes and drive modes. So the ability to go between say turf mode where I can turn real sharp, not tear up the grass, the all-wheel drive when I'm cruising down the trail and get the best traction. I I really like the throttle mode in Rangers. I often use work mode because it's kind of the the most gradual takeoff so I can get really good control at slow speed especially if I'm like, you know, chopping wood or hauling wood and going in and out of the woods and I need to be in real tight areas going slow. I do like that one a lot as well. And the new power steering and shifting capability that we've got here on 25 is like is way better. Super smooth, you know, return to center, really nice assist and I hit the gear I want every time. No grinding, don't have to worry about misshifting, you know. Overall, the other thing that I think for me is like the reach zones. You know, my my shoulders are against the seat. I can reach everything I need here, right? I can tip the steering wheel up and down, reach the switches, the shifter pedals are right where I need them. Super confidence inspiring on the brakes. Like overall everything in here is really easy to use. And that is not by accident. It is really hard to fit all of this stuff in the interior of a Ranger.

Chris Hendricks: And you noticed Pat's back never came off the seat while he was touching all this stuff including these new accessory sun visors.

Pat McArdle: Yeah, this is pretty trick right here. I like this one. You know, keep the sun out of your eyes on a long day when you're especially when you're driving into that sunset.

Chris Hendricks: Yeah. Yeah, that's a real nice feature there. But this is really a lot of Polaris' secret sauce is we spend the time to calibrate every one of these components. We spend the time to really lay out a dash so that everything fits well. We spend the time on ergonomics. It's all of those little things that culminate into the ride experience that you're going to get in a Ranger.

Pat McArdle: Yeah. And I think one of the other things when you talk about, you know, kind of how we do that ride tuning, right? You talked about all the different parts that go together. But one of the other things if I was out on a test trip with this rig, you know, I might have a water dummy in the seat next to me to simulate a passenger. I might have some gear in the back to simulate what you'd be carrying around. So we don't just tune the vehicle for one guy with nothing in it. We try to get the most common use cases, you know, for everyone around the country and world. And we tune the vehicle for that really application use, so that you're not overloading the vehicle and having it ride like this when you got a bunch of weight. You know, you can still maintain good steering control, you still got good compliant ride. So a lot of the a lot of the juice, you know, if you think about the special sauce really is calibrating the vehicle the way it's going to be used versus doing it kind of in a one-up configuration and ignoring the rest.

Chris Hendricks: Yeah. Yeah. If you think about how these vehicles feel on a showroom, a lot of them can seem really similar. Where the Polaris Ranger is really going to shine is once you get out and actually start using it and through the life of the vehicle. That's where all those little things that we do at Polaris are going to start to add up and make the experience a lot better. Hey, that's it for this episode of Shop Talk. Make sure you guys like, comment, subscribe. Let us know what you want to see next time.