YouTuber Buys a $150,000 Amphibious Sherp for $20,000 Under Market — Then Spends Three Weeks Finding Out WhyBuying a Ukrainian amphibious tank at a steep discount sounds like a win. Weston, the host of the Western Champlin YouTube channel, would like to offer a counterpoint.The specific model is the Sherp Pro, a skid-steer amphibious ATV manufactured in Kyiv that is capable of floating on water, tackling inclines up to 35 degrees, surmounting vertical obstacles as high as 70 centimeters, and carries a new retail price of approximately $150,000. Weston paid approximately $20,000 less than what similar vehicles were selling for at the time. He was excited. Briefly."I thought we got a really good deal on the Sherp, but it depends on how much it's going to cost to fix it, cuz it was about $20,000 cheaper than all the other ones. But there might have been a reason for it."AdvertisementAdvertisementThere was a reason for it.The Sherp Only Turned One DirectionThe Sherp's steering works like a bulldozer – or a zero-turn mower if you want a less intimidating comparison. A 5-speed manual gearbox sends power out to all four wheels through a chain-drive system, and to change direction, a clutch-and-drum-brake assembly on each side locks up the wheels on the inside of the turn while the outside wheels keep spinning. Pull the left stick, go left. Pull the right stick, go right. Simple in theory.Weston's Sherp would only go right. The left side brake response was barely there, making a full left turn somewhere between difficult and impossible. An off-camera crew member summed up the machine's other handling quirk early on: "The brakes are kind of wrong in your head. You pull back on the sticks, but you can't yank on it harder, you'll flip it."The initial diagnosis looked promising – brake rotors on the left side were heavily contaminated with oil and grease, which a can of brake cleaner seemed to address. The improvement was short-lived. With the Sherp back outside, Weston confirmed what was actually going on: "Both the brakes work fantastic. But whenever you go turn to left, the clutch on the right needs to lock up… and that clutch is slipping no matter what we do."AdvertisementAdvertisementRepairing a failing clutch pack inside a skid-steer drivetrain demands considerably more labor and complexity than addressing a contaminated rotor. Weston called Sherp USA, spent about half an hour on the phone with their service manager walking through brake and clutch adjustments, and tried tightening the hydraulic ram to spec – six millimeters of travel, per factory guidance. The clutch kept slipping. The verdict: new clutch plates required."Good news is clutch is 1,500 bucks. Bad news is we don't know how to put a clutch in it. But we're going to figure it out."Getting to the clutch pack meant pulling the main drive chain, both side chains, the brake assemblies, and eventually lifting the entire drivetrain carrier out of the Sherp's belly with a forklift – a process that took two full days, nearly gave Weston heat stroke, and revealed that the belly pan was sitting in a pool of water and grease deep enough to submerge the mounting bolts. The Sherp's sealed construction is designed to keep water out – an advertised feature. Here, it was keeping water in.Once the carrier was out, the replacement clutch didn't fit cleanly – the clearance was wrong, and the assembly sat loose in the drum. A crew member named Chris machined a custom shim on a rotary table in about an hour. With the shim in place, everything torqued down correctly, and the whole assembly went back in.AdvertisementAdvertisementThree weeks after delivery, the Sherp turned left. It also turned right. Weston was, by his account, shocked.The Sherp Pro runs a Kubota diesel making 44.3 horsepower, tops out at around 25 mph on land, and moves through water at roughly 4 mph using its low-pressure tubeless tires as paddle wheels. Per PubSafe.net, used and new Sherp units currently trade between $100,000 and $175,000, with a reasonable number of low-hours examples on the secondary market – which is presumably where discounted vehicles with undisclosed clutch problems end up. Sourcing replacement components designed specifically for the Sherp can be a slow process, according to PubSafe, a factor that complicates the apparent savings of buying one below market value.Weston's plan is to use the Sherp as a camera and recovery vehicle for situations where the rest of the fleet gets stuck. Given that the channel has apparently gotten six trucks stuck in a river at once before, that seems like a reasonable use case. The Sherp, for its part, is now fully functional and apparently does not care about mud, snow, or standing water. It just needed someone to figure out why it was going in circles first.