What’s so bad about the Apex? I know very little about these.
They are heavy. Some years had issues with slides and bogey wheels being eaten up at alarming rates. There was an issue with water getting into some connector on the wiring harness, causing an issue with starting. The come out of the factory with suspension setup for a 12yr old boy (at least the earlier ones, bottoming out bigtime). Most all these issues can be fixed for cheap.
I bought mine with 2k on it, it already had the suspension setup reworked, so no issue there. Apparently, I have the “good” year for the rear skid, so no bogey wheel issues, no excessive slide wear to speak of. I read up alot on the Totally Yamaha forums about the no start issue, simple fix, apply dielectric grease to the one connection that can fuck up, no big deal.
My only complaints: it’s heavy and the hand warmers suck. Barely get warm. ( there is a fix for this though). Other than that, the machine has been reliable, decent on fuel, and plenty fast enough for me.
I do think I might be looking into picking up a 2012 1100 SnoPro… Even though I’ve always been 100% Yamaha, that new SnoPro is awesome. The motor has been proved, just want to see how the chassis is going to hold up.
---------- Post added at 04:14 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:54 PM ----------
They are real darty (apex’s). Mine came with Ski Doo pilot skis, it’s perfectly fine, just a little pushy in soft snow.
my father has an 07 apex RTX, he bought new it and the only way to get the track to stop ratcheting was to tighten up the track so bad that it wore the sliders out in 100 miles. the track that was on it was only clipped every third window, so you may as well pull the track and the drives out and put ski-doo anti ratchet drives, add a few bogey wheels, and put a fully clipped track on it. now that thats done the suspension still sucks. yamaha uses a falling rate suspension on these. so as the suspension gets closer to bottoming out the suspension gets softer. so when you have it stiff up top it sucks through the stutter bumps but doesn’t bottom out through the big ones, on the opposite if you have it soft up top it takes the stutters good but bottoms out on anything bigger. so your best bet back there is to throw the whole yammi skid out and put a fire cat or rev skid on it. the front suspension sucks. tons of ski lift and bottoming. and worst of all is the sled does not turn. it pushes through anything soft or packed snow. he has a set of snow trackers and that made it as manageable as it could be. even with these on it it still feels like it has no carbides on it at all. a friend of mine rode it and actually said that he thinks it needs new carbides before knowing it had these carbides with 3" keels on them lol. the best way to ride this sled through the twistys is to hammer it when it gets straight and slowly glide around the corner the best you can without running into something then when you get around it hammer it again. now i absolutely love the engine. if you could put this engine in the ski-doo rt chassis you would have the bread winner.
My machine must be setup really good or something. No ski lift, the only thing I do notice is it does tend to push in soft snow conditions. I attribute this to the pilot skis. They were pushy on my SX Viper too. The 2012 Yamaha skis are apparently awesome, and are claiming to fix darting and plowing. Only $69 a ski too.