We’ve owned our 2018 Polaris Ranger 570 Mid-size for a little over a year, and we love it! Since owning, we’ve changed the oil a few times, had a shifter cable malfunction/break (our dog did it!), and a sticky tilting cargo box release.
Faulty 2018 Polaris Ranger 570 Cargo Box Release Lever
We bought it from 4×4 Country, the best place in Western North Carolina to buy a UTV. Since the first day we test drove this very same UTV we purchased, the release lever on the tilting cargo box was ‘funny’. It seemed a little sticky and never easily released unless you really jammed it. They offered to fix it at no cost when we bought it, but when delivered, I forgot to mention anything. Didn’t really seem to be a big issue, and never thought to call them about it. I hust kept jamming that release lever for about a year. ha. And that was working.
What Happened
Well, all that jamming stretched out the spring on the locking mechanism, under the cargo bed. Just slightly, the last curl around the spring was noticeably wider. In fact, it stretched so much, it fell off one end. Luckily it didn’t completely fall off, the other end was still secure, the spring was just dangling.
Of course the best solution might have been to purchase a new spring. It’s only a few bucks. But it’s a 20 minute drive (40 minutes round trip) to the nearest dealer, and they’re closed on Sundays… so I fixed it myself. First I attempted to tighten the stretched area. It didn’t help at all. Then I narrowed the loop near the gap by slightly squeezing it closed and connected it again. I noticed a small hole was already in the lever, just behind where the spring connected
How I fixed the stuck Polaris Ranger Cargo Box Lever
Easy solution: zip tie saves the day… again!! I used a zip tie to secure end of spring to lever. Amazingly, this simple zip-tie seems to have solved both problems. The problem of the spring being stretched out so it fell off the lever. And also the problem of the sticky cargo bed release, it’s now working properly without any noticeable trouble.
Perhaps the spring was slightly out of wack from the beginning, from the factory. Maybe it wasn’t stretched quite enough when it was manufactured. The extra little stretch from jamming it too much might have corrected the sticky lever problem, but then it fell off. The zip tie kept it on. Problem solved!
Hope this fixes someone problem…
If you want to fix it the ‘right way’, which I didn’t do, the official 2018 Polaris Ranger 570 midsize OEM SPRING for Cargo Box Latch is Item #7041687. At time of this writing, it’s under $5.
