In reply to GCrites80s:
I think it comes down to, the people with the money don't want to ride a fire breathing dragon. They want something that will carry their cooler, play their music, and still let them spend lots of money keeping up with the Jones's. That's driving the prices of the machines and the parts. UTVs are a going to be a rich mans sport.
I hate driving things without mirrors. Problem solved.
And the tires showed up. Naturally I had to go ahead and mount them. This was the least aggressive tread I could find. This thing will probably see a fair amount of asphalt time at the race track.
Old busted and new hotness.
If you go through those too fast on asphalt you might have to switch to 12" car tires and wheels from say a Festiva. For a while there the top quad racers were doing that in the front on hardpack tracks -- though the grooved the radials.
Yesterday during all the rain, I replaced the intake manifold and temperature sending unit. That's pretty much solved the rest of the engine problems. It runs perfectly and the cooling fan cycles like it should.
While I was shuffling everything back where it belongs after Irma, I took a couple of pictures.
I'm getting a twitch. 
I mean how hard could it be to drop a Samurai body on a UTV chassis... 
love the tin top!
I did a little more work on this thing today. At the top of the list was the AWD. So I got it up onto jackstands, pulled the front end off again and straight wired the front differential to the battery. Presto, the system worked. I did some more testing and determined that for some reason, the ECU wasn't sending voltage to the diff. There are several reasons for this, but I decided to bypass all the safety crap and the ECU, and just wire the system directly through the switch. That worked like a charm and the AWD now works like it should.
While I had the bumper off, I went ahead and installed the winch, fairlead, and winch controls. I now have a working winch.
Winch relays mounted under the hood.
Not perfect wiring, but good enough.
Winch control switch mounted in the dash.
Then we had to go test the AWD in the woods behind the house.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/JpeRhkCgfhM
How about a update on this thing?
3 years in and my father uses it almost every day around the farm. His golf carts mostly sit in the garage because the Polaris rides so much better. It has a little over 19000 miles on it and still runs very well.
Total repairs are 6 oil changes and a full set of suspension bushings.
The only other issue is it has a lot of slop in the front driveshaft so I'm going to have to replace some u-joints this winter.
It's a pretty impressive machine.
In reply to Toyman01 (Moderately Supportive Dude) :
We bought one for my uncle. He loves the thing compared to the atv he was using.
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