wet clutch

You can potentially damage the engine wearing the wet clutches. But it's not the wearing of a wet clutch over several thousand kilometers that does it. It's the fast premature failure that does it.

All that Friction material clogs up the engine oil pump pickup screen, and this starves the pump of oil, which starves the engine of oil pressure.
Wearing out a wet clutch every 10,000 kilometers (6000 miles) is not am issue. You oil filter and oil changes will handle that. It's when you wear out a wet clutch in 500 miles (or even 1000 milesl, especially multiple clutch shoes, that creates the problem.

Out of curiosity how do you know if your clutch is slipping if you put in the wrong oil?

monksblood said:

Out of curiosity how do you know if your clutch is slipping if you put in the wrong oil?

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The engine will rev up but you won't move or you'll move very slowly.

just the idea of shared oil is crazy is this the norm for atv .....

ginochip said:

just the idea of shared oil is crazy is this the norm for atv .....

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Yes it is normal.
Why is it a crazy idea? When operated in a stock setup with proper oil changes, most wet clutches will last the life of the ATV. It's a proven design. Even in cases of abuse (large tires, deep mud, using wrong gear range, etc...), most will still last for thousands of miles.
All geared ATV's have this setup, and some automatic transmissions use it (Yamaha, Suzuki, some Arctic Cat and the Kawasaki Teryx 800).

X2 what Dezz said. Normal oil and filter change will remove friction material from normal wear and tear
In my case hade 2 failures within 500kms because of big motor and when engine was torn down oil pick up was 80% plugged with material from clutch shoes.


Best mod for wet clutch if running mods or big tires is spending the $50 for a set of wet slugs for the wet clutch. After I installed these have had anymore wet clutch issues. The UTV guys thought up idea of wet slugs when they started supercharging the Rhinos and couldn't get the wet clutches to live