One of the things the Polaris Rangers have been plagued with up until model year 2009 is a non-adjustable front strut suspension. While this has proved to be very successful for Polaris through the year for providing a nice plush ride, hence their slogan for “Hardest Working, Smoothest Riding,” the problem has been that it’s not great for more aggressive riders. There’s been a few companies come out with stiffer springs, different struts, but nobody has ever come out with a full front strut like Works Performance now has. Not only that, Works came up with a very unique way to provide fully adjustable Pro level front struts with compression, rebound, and pre-load adjustability. And, if you’re thinking this isn’t a big deal, think again. Remember that with a strut design, there’s no access to the bottom of the shock where the rebound adjuster normally goes. Works could have left it out of the shock design, but instead they went all the way by putting the adjuster at the top of the piston. How, you ask? Well, they fed it up through the center of the shaft itself. I thought this was a great way to overcome a rather difficult engineering feat and is most likely why nobody else has such a system in place for strut equipped vehicles like the Ranger XP.
Aside from the ingenious way they incorporated the rebound adjuster, these Works Performance Pro Front Struts have another unique feature in their pre-load adjuster. Instead of just having a nice smooth shock body sliding down into the strut housing, Works Performance added a threaded section to the top of the shock body to allow for pre-load adjustability. For those that like to jump, haul lots of stuff, or hook up a heavy plow in the winter, you now have an option for adjustable pre-load for your pre-2009 Ranger XPs. Before this, people resorted to heavier spring rates, rubber coil spacers, or just got used to bottoming out all the time on big hits. Now you can adjust the preload up to your desired ride height just like you’ve always been able to do with the rear.
Last, in regards to the front struts, there’s also compression dampening control, as well. So, to date, there’s no other company that provides you this type of control and adjustability for Polaris Rangers. As you’d imagine, they’re also not the cheapest thing available, but you definitely get what you pay for. Before we jump into the real life testing, let’s not forget about the rear shocks, either.
With the rear shocks, Works provided yet another set of pro level dual rate shocks to provide the ride we were expecting. The rear shocks have the same compression and rebound dampening control, preload, but they also added in the dual rate springs to further help control the ride on the Ranger. So, let’s talk about what dual rate springs are designed to do. In simple terms, dual rate springs are designed to provide a smoother ride over smaller terrain, yet still be able to absorb the larger hits caused by jumping or hitting whoops at high speeds. So, how’s this work exactly, you ask? Well, normally, you have a lighter/shorter top spring, and a heavier/longer bottom spring. Here’s the math behind it:
Let’s say we have a 100 lb top spring (tender), and a 200 lb bottom spring (main). Since these are both linear springs, it takes 100 lbs to move the tender spring 1” and 200 lbs to move the main spring 1”. But, when you combine the two springs on top of each other, it changes things entirely. Now, to move both springs 1”, it’s really a totally different spring rate than you’d expect. Here’s the equation:
Tender spring (100 lbs) x Main spring (200 lbs) / Tender Spring (100 lbs) + Main spring (200 lbs) = 66.67 lb Primary Rate and 200 lb secondary rate.
So, what does this really mean? Well, once the actual spring rates are determined, that will provide you the ride height you desire, you can totally change the characteristics of the ride by changing the spring rates and where the stop is located to activate the main spring. The stop can be adjusted up or down to essentially relieve the top (tender) spring of its duties, so to speak. If you raise the stop higher, this allows the shock to ride longer on the softer tender (top) spring. If you lower it, it activates the main (bottom) spring quicker, resulting in it riding on the secondary rate sooner. Wow, a lot of math and confusing stuff, huh? Well, in a nutshell, here are a few things you can correct with a dual rate spring:
1) Rebounding too fast, making your rear end buck up – Adjust the spring stop higher so it works off the softer top (tender) spring longer which will produce less rebound force.
2)Bottoming out too hard – Adjust the spring stop lower to activate the heavier bottom (main) spring to help prevent the bottoming from occurring.
Please keep in mind we’re talking just about spring rate changes here by moving the spring stop up or down. Obviously, there’s still the compression and rebound dampening controls of these shocks to further adjust your ride quality. But, let’s say you really like the slow speed ride of your vehicle, but when jumping, you’re still getting too much bottoming out. A lot of this can obviously be fixed by turning up the compression dampening, but this is going to affect both low and high speed dampening and might reduce your ride quality at slow speeds, as well. So, let’s just play with the math a little bit:
Let’s say instead of running the 100 lb and 200 lb spring combination, let’s say we do a 75 lb and a 300 lb spring combination. The resulting primary rate is 60 lbs, and the secondary rate is 300 lbs. So, now we have an even plusher ride, and when we go to jump big jumps, we now have an additional 100 lbs of force working against us bottoming out. Hope this gives you some simple things to think about, which we’ve tried to do here. There are a lot of dynamics to all of this working in unison together, and just to make sure you’re clear, a properly set up single rate shock setup is always better than an improperly set up dual rate setup. But, a properly set up dual rate is going to be better than a properly set up single rate, as well.
So, now that we’ve shown you how these new Works Shocks are going to revolutionize what’s available for strut equipped Polaris Rangers, let’s go on the test ride. We took the Ranger out to a testing area in Phoenix, AZ where a lot of racers have set up a track to test their bigger race vehicles. We’ve ridden out here before with long travel equipped UTVs, so we thought it would be a good comparison to take the utilitarian-ish Ranger XP with its new high performance Works Shocks to see what it could handle. And, just a little information about the terrain: It’s very rutted and rough from the big trucks digging it out. So, we went around the first lap and realized that when running 27” Bighorns and no lift anymore that the front can hit the fenders under full compression. So, we quickly adjusted the compression dials up a few notches and off we went again. This time, it rode a lot more level and we experienced no bucking like you normally would in any stock Ranger or UTV. The rear seemed flawless, and although we didn’t do it up front because we didn’t have a jack with us, I would have turned in a few turns of pre-load to raise the front end a tad higher than it was. Overall, the shocks worked very well. What was so surprising to me was that at slow speeds it still had that “Smoothest Riding” type ride of the stock shocks, yet at much higher speeds, it handled the whoops and jumps with no problem at all. In the past, if you had hit this stuff as fast as we were, you’d be in trouble with the stock shocks for sure. With the Works Performance shocks, we found ourselves driving a lot faster through sections and felt very stable and safe doing so. Honestly, for such a large and heavy UTV to handle like this, it was quite an amazing difference over stock.
