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https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/trucks/a19061404/snowcat/
This guy wrote a fairly good article about snowcats. I tried to get a plug in for the forums site.
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This guy wrote a fairly good article about snowcats. I tried to get a plug in for the forums site.
The Ice-Kicking Glory of the Snowcat
Those enclosed tracked machines you see grooming ski resort trails and crossing Antarctica? You can buy 'em.
LMC
Let's say you need to get to the top of a snowy mountain for no good reason. Consider your options? Mule? Mules bite. Jeep? No, tires slip on near-vertical ice. How about an enclosed, two-ton tub with tank tracks that can be legally registered as a snowmobile? Now you're talking.
A tool for scientists, ski resorts, militaries, and polar explorers, snowcats are specialized machines used for snowy trail maintenance and tackling extreme terrain. But there's no law that says you can't buy one, and more and more private buyers are snapping up classic models as commercial users rotate them out of service.
“In a lot of cases, you can make your own road.”
“It's a pretty surreal feeling at first, because you start goin' up hills you don't think a machine should be able to go up,” says Dan Gates, owner of Snow Cat Service in Salt Lake City. “Kinda feels like you're drivin' an old World War II tank, I would imagine.”
These are rugged rides, a visceral experience to drive. Most of the affordable 1960s and 1970s snowcats house the engine between the driver and passenger. Exhaust pipes exit two feet from ears, and cabins are fairly noisy inside. “You can feel everything through the seat,” says Craig Carrick, owner of Salt Lake City's other restoration shop, the SnowCat Guy. “They have incredible traction, and they're very maneuverable. I've had them in some interesting places.”
Birth of a Beast
LMC
Snowcats are, by orthodox definition, enclosed machines built to traverse unpaved icy terrain with tank-style rubber or metal tracks that are spun by rows of hard rubber wheels. Most have two tracks, each running the length of the vehicle, but a few historical models have had four independently sprung tracks. Their origin story is convoluted because the commercial market took decades to develop in the early 20th century, evolving first from tractors and Ford Model T conversions. If a snowcat is only a tracked vehicle for crossing ice and snow, Captain Robert Falcon Scott had two built by Wolseley Motors for his 1910 Antarctic expedition. But those were non-production steel sleds, each with an exposed bucket seat atop, and don’t resemble modern snowcats as much as a two blown-apart tanks.
By the 1930s and 1940s,Tucker and Bombardier were selling production snowcats that looked like enclosed-cab tractors, with wide rear bodywork, pinched front ends, rear tracks, and steerable front-end skis. Later in the decade, both evolved the snowcat toward its modern shape. Bombardier introduced the 12-passenger Snow Bus, which looked like a VW Bus-tank, and Tucker introduced the Sno-Cat, which replaced the front-end skis with a second pair of tracks.
"Kinda feels like you're drivin' an old World War II tank."
The North American market was dominated through the rest of the 20th century by Tucker and Bombardier, along with now-defunct Thiokol, which was bought out by John DeLorean and sold under the DMC badge (the same one that made the DMC-12 sports cars of Back to the Future fame). When DMC went bankrupt, the snowcat side of the business was renamed the Logan Manufacturing Company (LMC) and kept kicking until 2000.
Tucker's famous for using four independently turning tracks versus one long tack on each side, which gives them a tighter turning radius, while Thikols tend to be slightly smaller and less tractor-like. The Tucker Sno-Cat and Thiokol/DMC/LMC IMP, each about the size and weight of a Toyota Land Cruiser, are the Ford F-Series and Chevrolet C/K Series of the snowcat universe. Classifieds are dominated by these two models.
Newer models use hydrostatic steering, in which each side's track runs independently. You can put one stick in reverse and the other in forward to spin the snowcat inside its own footprint if you like getting dizzy, though all the hydraulic-fluid controls add cost and complexity. Like Al Rhodes' 1977 Thiokol Model 3700 Hydromaster, one of the first hydrostatic models.
“It was a basket case, given to me for free,” he says. “I've been a certified master truck mechanic since 1982, and it took me two summers to do all the work and get it running.” The affordable older models of the 1960s and 1970s tend to use brake steering, which drives more like a car. You've got a gas pedal that drives both sides' tracks at once, and to turn you apply a brake to one side. If a bear jumps out from your right, you mash the left lever to turn left. If a doomsday cultist jumps out from your left, you mash the right lever to turn right.
“It's just like drivin' a tractor,” says Dee Hansen of Kaysville, a town in northern Utah. “My dad, who's in his mid-70s, can drive it.”
Make Your Own Road
For the same reason people ride motorcycles when they don't have to or fly light aircraft when an American Airlines ticket would be cheaper, there's a fascination with piloting something mechanical for the sheer joy of it and not trying to make total sense of it.
Twelve years ago, Hansen bought a 1976 Tucker Sno-Cat for $18,500 in already refurbished condition. He just sold it so he could upgrade to a $48,000 2001 Tucker-Terra Sno-Cat 2000. “We bought it to ride up to our (winter) cabin and go backcountry skiing,” he says. “I have little kids, and it was too hard to get 'em on snowmobiles, so we bought this fully enclosed snowcat with a heater inside.”
“I found both of my snowcats on Craigslist,” says John Haynes of Salt Lake City, who spent $7,000 for a 1982 DMC 1450 Super IMP and $25,000 for a larger 1986 LMC 1500. “At any given time during winter, there's about ten for sale locally. Most are pretty beat up. It's tough to find a clean one you don't have to do much work on.” Aside from Craigslist and eBay, ForumsForum has an active snowcat section, and if you're in Utah you'll have good luck on KSL.com, a popular local analog similar to Craigslist run by a Salt Lake City news station.
Laws are fuzzy and fragmented down to a local level. Various counties make snowcat owners register them as snowmobiles, tractors, agricultural vehicles, off-highway vehicles, or cars. How they're registered determines how owners can use them on public land. The ultimate prize is to register it as a snowmobile, since the West is full of snowmobile trails that most snowcats can easily fit on. Which makes sense, since plow-wielding snowcats are what the ski resorts, state governments, and the Bureau of Land Management use to make those trails.
“In a lot of cases, you can make your own road,” says Haynes, who uses the phone app AllTrails to find joyriding spots. “Typically, though, you're driving up a dirt Jeep road or a logging road.” Just like off-roading clubs, snowcat clubs organize meetups and trail rides. When I talked to Gates, he was getting ready to head up to McCall, Idaho for a Snowcat Jamboree, a five-day festival for snowcat owners who travel from all over the country to hang out and ride trails. They trailer them the same way owners of ludicrously huge rock-crawling Jeeps tow their toys to the Rubicon. Small snowcats can be towed by a three-quarter-ton truck, and a half-ton works for the smallest models in a pinch. If you pair the right tow rig with the right snowcat, you can even share parts between them.
“All of the drivetrain – motor, trans, and clutch – is like working on a good, old carbureted classic truck,” says Gates, who claims to have close to 100 regular customers. Nine out of 10 snowcats that pass through his shop are privately owned. AMC and Ford straight-sixes were popular motors in older models, and Cummins turbo-diesel inline-fours are the standard for heavier modern snowcats, but manufacturers favored stranger choices, too.
For example, Sweden's Aktiv Fischer Snow Trac, sold from 1957 to 1981, used air-cooled Volkswagen flat-fours. Thiokol offered a Ford Taunus V4 on its smaller models in the 1970s. Frankly, owners will cram anything they can into the engine bay. Hansen had a '72 Chrysler V-8 in his '76 Sno-Cat, and he says parts even in the 2010s are easily found at any auto parts store.
But the mechanics beyond the transmission represent another game entirely.
Old Cats, New Tricks
A snowcat moves snow at the Olympic slopestyle course at Phoenix Snow Park on February 4, 2018 in Pyeongchang-gun, South Korea.
Getty Images
“Some of these 'cats I work on are from the '50s,” says Carrick, who maintains 29 snowcats for 25 clients. “And it's definitely getting trickier to find certain things.” Aside from basic tune-ups, most of the work he does is track maintenance. Rebuilding a pair of tracks means loosening, replacing, and tightening 800 to 1,000 nuts and bolts. Several suppliers bought up LMC's stock when it went out of business, and while new-old stock parts are easily found in some cases, Gates' shop still has to manufacture axles, spindles, leaf springs, and track cleats.
“The differential and tracks are unique, so there's a bit of a learning curve,” he says. “We've had to fabricate our own special tools to work on the tracks, because it's very difficult to get wrenches inside them.”
Jennifer Morse, a climate technician at the Mountain Research Station (MSR) in Roosevelt National Forest, unloads her snowcat after arriving at the Niwot Ridge NOAA research site on March 28, 2017 near Nederland, Colorado. Morse either skis or uses the snowcat once a week to access the remote site, located at 11,500 feet, to collect air samples.
Getty ImagesHelen H Richardson
Difficulties working on anything beyond the drivetrain are why shops like Carricks' and Gates' are popping up and growing. “On our '76 Sno-Cat, we spent about $1,500 a year on upkeep and maintenance,” says Hansen, who's including labor since Carrick maintains his. “I expect about the same $1,500 to $2,000 a year on the '01 (Sno-Cat).”
Fuel economy is hard to pin down because so much of it depends on altitude and snow conditions. An engine makes less power at higher altitudes because the air is less dense, and non-turbocharged engines are especially affected. Harder packed snow is also easier to drive on. Gates guesses his personal Super IMP returns two or three miles per gallon. Most owners laugh when I ask. If they were trying to be frugal, they wouldn't be driving vertically.
“It's a very special solitude,” says Haynes, “when you get on these trails and stop, looking up over a mountainside of meadows or a sunset, and realize you're the only person around, and that very few people have ever been there to witness that sight before.”
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