Further investigation of the emulsion on the oil filler cap - better news

When I was looking around the web about emulsion on the oil filler cap I came across some comments about checking that the crankcase breather was working and that there were no split hoses. So I set about finding where the breather was and how to check it. The pictures in the manual are not at all clear but I traced it from the carburettor inlet. Underneath the air filter mounting plate I spotted an open ended hose and when I got hold of it there was lot of black grease around it. The hose had come adrift from the bottom of the air filter and it didn't have a retaining clip to secure it. I guess the black oil was where the breather was discharging crankcase fumes. So this might be another cause of the emulsion of the oil filler cap as the crankcase would not have been under vacuum and the moisture wouldn't be drawn out.

The other thing I wanted to test was if the breather valve was working and not blocked as this can also evidently cause problems. One comment I'd read said to just put a length of tube on the breather discharge at the carbureter inlet and suck ...  both with the oil filler cap on and also with it off. I got no resistance with the cap off but resistance with it on. I also blew down it and this gave resistance.  So it seemed to all be connected and working fine.  

I then took the Argo up to the forest and drove it around a bit. The temperature gauge was still cycling, gradually building up to 95C and them going back down to 80C quickly. Anyway I let it cool down and then rechecked the coolant level. This had gone down by just a little, perhaps about 25ccs, so I filled it up again. However the good news was that there was no emulsion in the oil filler tube. I've run the Argo for a few hours now and the emulsion has completely gone, however the temperature gauge is still cycling around the 80 to 95C range. I'm not sure what to do about this at present so will keep looking out for further information on this. In fact if anyone out there has any advice I'd be please to hear it, cycling temperature gauges just don't seem right to me.

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Emulsion in oil filler tube

So I've now got the tyres back and it seems all three had rim seal leaks due to rust around the rim.

The other problem with the Argo is that  there is some white emulsion in the oil filler tube but oil on the dip stick is fine and the coolant level is always right up to the radiator cap and never needs topping up. This is all a bit concerning so I spoke to Ian at Aird Motors and he just said without any hesitation .... too much cold running, take it out for a good run and get it fully warmed up.  So I did this last summer and the emulsion seemed to go away. However I noticed the engine temperature gauge never got above 100F (38C) and that was when going uphill with full throttle. So was the gauge faulty or was the engine never getting hot? So I checked the gauge by taking the wire off the temperature sender and earthing it. The gauge went full scale, so it seemed to be working fine.

Emulsion in the oil filler tube

Oil on the dipstick looks fine

I then decided to check the temperature of the coolant feed to the radiator by strapping a temperature gauge to the top pipe and started up the engine.  As soon as I started the engine, this showed an immediate temperature rise but it never rose above 31C.  This all pointed towards a stuck open thermostat and to get at this the manual says you need to take out the radiator.

So out came the battery and carrier frame to get at the radiator drain. This is a twist-to-open plastic affair with a nice slot in it to allow slow draining without take the whole plug out. So, very easy to put a pot underneath and let it drain whilst you get on with other jobs.  The coolant colour looked terrible.

I then disconnected the air cooling hoses to the disc brakes from their plastic manifold and then took out the manifold itself in front of the radiator as it just gets in the way. I had to remove the air filter to get the top hose off as there was no room to pull the hose off sideways and I also took out the expansion bottle to get at the bottom hose. Once the hose clamps was removed, the hoses came off quite easily with a light twist with some plumber's pliers. The radiator is held on by 4 bolts and when I was taking these off it was obvious that the radiator had been out before as 2 of the rubber insulators were missing. The radiator came out by moving it forward to get the bottom hose pipe clear of the expansion bottle bracket and upwards from there.

I flushed out the radiator in both directions, quite a lot of sludge came out, it all seemed to be in the bottom and freely came out. There was plenty of flow so I was quite happy with the radiator.

The manual says to remove the fan to get at the thermostat but you don't need to and I undid the two bolts of the housing without difficulty and gently pulled it off with the top hose still attached. I can't say I was completely surprised to find there wasn't a thermostat in the housing as one of my friends had said this was a possibility.  I'm not very happy about this because you start to postulate why it was removed in the first place.  Was it a quick fix to a problem or was it faulty and no replacement was at hand? I just don't know at present. 

Anyway I phoned Andy at Aird Motors and he had a new thermostat in stock. I had the foresight to ask him if it came with a gasket, so he opened the box and said "No". I don't know why manufacturers do this as you are always going to need a new gasket for the thermostat. Anyway Andy had them in stock and he said he would post the parts 1st class straight away. Fantastic service.  I also has a chat about which sort of antifreeze to use and he said they just use the blue stuff.  This has to be changed every 2 years whereas the more modern orange OAT lasts 5 years.  I had a little look at info on the web and eventually decided to go for Prestone Extended Life (yellow stuff) which gives 5 years protection and seems to be compatible with all antifreezes and engines and doesn't seem to cost anymore. 

The thermostat came the following lunchtime so I set about fitting it. The first thing I did was to test it by suspending it in boiling water to make sure it worked. An old traditional jam thermometer came in really handy here. The Thermostat is stamped  82C but the manual says it's not fully open till 95C. Anyway it seemed to be fine. Fitting was just a reverse of the removal process. The thermostat has a little fiddler valve which is to help get air out of the system and this needs to go at the top. I fitted the bottom hose before the radiatior was bolted back in place as the overflow bottle bracket gets in the way of doing this up.  I also took off the air filter again to fit the top hose. 

Regarding getting rid of air in the system the manual just says fill the radiator to the top, put the cap on, top up the expansion bottle, start up the engine, let it warm it up, switch off, let it cool and top up the radiator as necessary.

Once the battery was back in I pulled out the choke and started the engine and watched the engine temperature gauge very carefully. I also kept feeling the top of the radiator to see if it was getting hot. It got up to 80C quite quickly ... I'd never seen it get to this temperature ... and the radiator was showing some signs of not being as cold. The temperature climbed to 95C and all of a sudden the radiator was fully hot and the gauge slipped back to 80C.  I let it run for a bit and noticed that the gauge cycled between 80 and 95 C.  What was also noticeable was that the engine just sounds a lot sweeter than before.  I switched it off and let it cool before topping up with coolant.  I've done this a couple of times now and it all seems to be ok. I've also had good look around for leaks from hoses and the thermostat gasket but it all seems to be tight.

Annual service of the Argo

The weather is slowing starting to warm up so I thought I'd get the Argocat out and give it a good service. It was due to have its chains greased, the air filter precleaner washed and the outer bearings greased.  It had 3 slow punctures, two were rim seal leaks and the other seemed to be from a nail hole and these needed fixing.

I also wanted to change the coolant as it was looking rather dirty. I only realy noticed this at the end of last year when I used an anitfreeze tester to check that it would be OK over the winter. It is not unusual to get temperatures of  -17C here in Speyside. Anyway the glycol level was fine but it was a rather muddy colour and probably hadn't been changed for a long time.   

So, as is now my usual practice, I got it in the garage and jacked up both ends, put it in neutral so that the wheels would turn freely, stripped out the plastic floor liners and sprayed the chains, revolving them round as I turned one of the wheels. This is quite an easy job once you have the whole thing jacked up off the ground. I then took off the wheels and greased the outer bearings, two grease nipples per wheel. I quite enjoy the greasing but not undoing and replacing the 40 wheel nuts ... 5 per wheel. I took the three wheels with air leaks to the local garage after having tried to break the beads myself . You need the right tools and they probably hadn't been off for 15 years I just couldn't get them to budge.

Time for the spring service

Apologies for the long silence - we've been busy using the Argo in the forest  in the summer and autumn, then it's been tucked up in its shed for the winter. But we brought it home on Friday to do a few jobs which I will blog about over the next couple of weeks.

Not surprisingly the battery was flat when I came to start it but I had a spare one which has been charged by a set of solar panels in the forest - very effective. It ran perfectly once it had some battery power.

Using the Argo

I haven’t posted for a while as I've been at bit busy, mainly out in the forest. The Argo is running well and the time spent servicing it seems to have paid off.
We are trying to control the deer as we are not getting any tree regeneration in the forest, so we have been fixing the holes in the fence and adding new stakes where they have broken or rotted. We have also installed some stiles, otherwise people would just try and climb over the fence and no doubt damage it. The Argo has been great at getting materials out to the various locations.

One of the stiles is about half a mile from the nearest landrover track vehicle and I didn't fancy carrying the timbers, but with the Argo it easy.

One of the stiles under construction

I've also been cutting out some of the wind blown trees with a chainsaw and using the Argo to drag them out. There is more than enough for a lorry load so I might try and sell them, otherwise I'll just use them for firewood.

Initially I just tied a rope around the trunk and pulled out with the Argo but the ends dig in quite a bit and get covered in mud. So I made up a skidder from off-cuts of timber and put steel runners on the bottom. It's working quite well and the Argo make light work of it. So much so that I'm going to make up a bigger version to take 4 trees at a time

Towing timber with the skidder Two ends of a loop a rope go through a hoop in the end plate and then I used timber hitch knots around the log. The end loop just goes over the Argo towbar ball.
The rope is quite thin making it the weak link if anything goes wrong.

We've driven round the site quite a bit recently trying to find the best routes to various points in the forest. The land is difficult to traverse even in the Argo. It was high forest till about 1990, when clear felled so it has lots of tree stumps sticking up out of the ground which are now covered in heather or moss. On top of this, it's been forestry-ploughed such that there are deep parallel ditches at 2m spacing over much of the site. If you are in the heather you know there are lots of plough ditches but you can't see them without getting out and walking.

I've not been stuck yet but I've come quite close to it when one set of wheels fell into a plough ditch. Luckily I managed to reverse may way out

Argo on one of the old tracks in the forest.

The route we used to get up the hill

This is where we are going today.

Once we have got some routes sorted out it will get a lot easier as they will get flattened out with use. So hopefully over the next few months getting round will be a lot easier.

Keeping the rain out

We still don’t have our own trailer for the Argo which is why The Forester was keen to get it serviced and in good nick before taking it up to the forest about 15 miles away. He didn’t want to have to keep bringing it back home to fix things.

Fortunately our neighbour has an excellent trailer which he is happy to lend us, and it’s great to be able to use that until we find one of our own. The other issue is at the moment we don’t have any undercover storage for the vehicle up at the woodland so we needed to get some sort of cover.

After various ideas, we bought a “small car cover” for £20. This looked OK apart from the fact that the box says it isn’t waterproof, which rather defeats the object. However, this does seem to be an overly defensive statement as maybe you couldn’t carry water in it, but it does seem to provide plenty of protection. To be on the safe side, we’re putting a plastic tarpaulin underneath it.



Within 24 hours of taking the Argo and its cover up to the wood, we had some heavy snowfall followed by several days of rain. The cover is in fact a bit too large and so was liable to sag and pond. Two strategies to solve this: a couple of tucks in it using cable ties to make it fit better, plus a patent hoop construction - two bits of wood and two bits of plastic piping - provide a frame to sit in the back and raise the cover so water won’t collect in.


Plans are in place to build a shed for it but this is working for now.

Finishing off the servicing

Fixing the parking brake:

I managed to get a new bolt for the parking brake from Aird's, it was about £2 including postage. Fitting was straight forward and I got both sides of the handbrake caliper adjusted and it now seems to work fine. I did have a good look around for the missing nut and bolt underneath the engine and gearbox but I didn't find it and in the end only one bolt was missing. So this is all sorted and a feel a lot happier now that it can be parked on a hill and not have to worry about it running away

So to the oil change:

The oil drain plug is on the side of the engine (the big bolt just above the drive belt in first picture above) . Draining the oil from here looked like a horrible job as a lot of oil was bound to miss any collection vessel and go all over the floor of the Argo. So after some thought, I decided to buy a oil pump and suck the oil out of the dipstick tube. The unit I bought came with two tube sizes but neither were small enough, but I happen to have a smaller tube in stock and so used this with the others all joined up to get down to the size required. Getting the tube down the dip stick tube wasn't that easy as it seemed to get stuck some way from the bottom but I eventually managed by using the dipstick as a guide as I pushed the tube down. I think I might buy a length of solid tubing for the next oil change to get over this problem.

Anyway the oil sucker worked a treat, very quick and no mess. I only got about 1.5 litre of oil out and the manual says it needs 1.8 litre, so I wasn't sure I'd got it all at first. However the oil filter is mounted horizontally on the front of the engine and when I started to loosen this I soon realised where the rest of the oil was. The thread is so long that it takes quite a while to get the filter off and effectively all the oil in the filter runs down the engine. Fortunately I had plenty of rags underneath it which caught most of the oil. A very messy job but the oil was warm so it gave a strange warming feeling to my fingers. Definitely worth wearing latex gloves. I then fitted the new filter and added the new oil. Job done.



Oil filter at the front of the engine. Not the easiest of places to work. Kawasaki part number 49065-2071





The next job was to replace the fuel filter. This is a semi transparent unit and the filter element was a brown rusty colour. I removed the front seat and undid the jubilee clips. The fuel pipes were quite hard and it was very difficult to get them off the old filter. With a lot of gentle easing, a small screwdriver and twisting both ends eventually came free. Alas with all this messing around the jubilee clip on the tank end had vanished down the pipe into a crevice on top of the tank and out of sight. It seemed to take ages messing around to get it back up the tube for re-connection of the new filter. Next time I'll undo this clip, move it down the pipe a little and then tighten it up so does not vanish out of sight again.

So almost finished with the servicing, the last job was to have a look at the tyres and rims. Some didn't seem to be holding pressure for long so I took them off one by one and put soapy water on the tyre, rim and valve to find out where the problems were. It was quite obvious really, the rims were knocked about a lot and the bead seals were foaming up. These are 5 hole rims and not easy to find but I did give Aird's a phone and they had them in stock. They are about £40 each but they did offer to include fitting the tyre for this price. Some of the tyres don't have much tread left so I think I'll just live with this for the moment. When I get fed up with pumping them up I'll have to bite the bullet.

So all the servicing is now done and ready to go.