Wintertime Fun

[Balu]

Great pics, NT!
Thank you for the pleasure.

[sundaydriver]

Great pics as always! Makes me sad though as I see my snow blower gassed & raring to go, but just sitting all winter with only one usage.

[NightTrain]

Just got back last night from hauling up lumber... man, I'm getting old! I remember doing this back when I was in my Twenties with no repercussions, but I'm mighty sore today.

Riding hard & pulling a heavy load is a full body workout. And this is a hell of a lot more expensive than a gym membership!

[NightTrain]

Beer Break halfway up. I'm riding the old black one there with the stitched windshield - this is the oldest one in the fleet, and a perfect freight hauler because it has a steel body instead of the lightweight aluminum of modern snowmachines. If you tried to hook one of the new high-power low-weight snowmachines to a load like this, it would rip the snowmachine in half within a few miles.

This is the machine that I dropped through the ice into 5' of water while she was still running 15 years ago, and it sat overnight with a block full of water in zero degree weather. I was hypothermic with an internal body temp of 91 degrees after diving down underwater to lift it back up to the surface, so the machine was of secondary importance at the time. We pulled it to a heated garage the next morning and let it thaw for a couple of hours while we ate breakfast, squirted some WD-40 down the cylinders, pulled the ripcord to shoot all the water out of the block, added more WD-40, replaced the plugs and she fired right up! Absolutely amazing for that little aluminum engine to take that kind of abuse without consequence. She still purrs like a kitten to this day.

There's 20 sheets of 1/2" sheathing plywood on the freight sled, so a pretty good load for the old Skandic 377.

I have a new windshield on order from Amazon, but in the meantime, a drill and a bunch of tie-wraps hold it together. Ugly, but functional! We laughed about how silly it looks, but we got nods of approval from locals with our field-mod handiwork!

[NightTrain]

Successful trip.

[NightTrain]

And now we have enough to enclose the new 2-story drive-thru shop.

The little Kawasaki 4-wheeler waiting in the shed for warmer months.

[NightTrain]

I'm pretty proud of that freight sled. We built that 25 years ago and perfected the design over many seasons of trial and error combined with 2,000 pound loads in bad conditions.

The beauty of it is the 4 independent skis and adjustable body. It's 1.25" square steel tubing and it can be adjusted to accommodate almost any kind of load you want in a few seconds. Simply pull the pins and extend the width or length of the sled, put the pins back in and ratchet strap it all down. For this load, I configured the sled for the 4' x 8' sheets of plywood. The maximum width and length is 6' x 12'.

Also, the front skis turn with the snowmachine and pivots under the front of the sled according to how the tongue directs them, so it tracks perfectly in line with the snowmachine. That means that it doesn't slide around corners and follows like it should, resulting in a lot less work for the snowmachine and stress on everything involved. That ability is critical to pulling heavy loads and navigating tight corners.