Living With Them

On a quad, tracks are seasonal hardware. A set goes on when the ground turns, comes off when it thaws, and spends the rest of the year in a corner of a shed. What that year costs you is decided by three things: where four units sit when they are off the machine, whether the machine-specific hardware is still identifiable next autumn, and — if the set came second-hand — whether the mount kit underneath was ever the one published for your quad.

Two measurements do most of the work. The unit weights are published by every manufacturer here, and they are what a rack or a shelf has to hold — four units, with the front and the rear published at different weights, so a rack built for one figure is wrong for half the set. The second measurement is your own tape across the machine once the set is on, because that is what a trailer, a ramp and a shed door have to clear. Take it before the swap rather than during it.

No manufacturer here publishes a wear limit, so there is no threshold to measure a worn part against. What works instead is comparison: photograph the same part at each corner, keep the photographs from one season to the next, and take the hardware you cannot identify to the parts desk with pictures rather than a description.