Looking for ideas and pics of a snowmobile towable drag to smooth out a strip that gets lots of snowmobile traffic. Thoughts?

If you want to go the cheap route, you can grab a couple heavy (ier) pallets. Just put a couple eye bolts on the front and back of the first pallet, and a couple eye bolts on the front of the second, and carabiner them together. Use either a hard point tow hitch (better/faster), or rope(have to go slow or end up with oscillations) to pull from the bumper hitch. The bottom slats should go perpendicular to the path of travel. Depending on snow conditions, you can choose to use or not use the second pallet.

I do this on our strip near Talkeetna; towed with a 2008 Ski Doo Tundra LT 550 fan. Works nice for grooming the ski strip, as well as grooming ski trails through our woods.

I've made several iterations of mine, just to experiment with different stuff. Found that removing every other slat on the bottom allows the fresh snow to dump out and fill holes in the path. Without removing the extra slats, the snow built up and the sledge would become too heavy for tight turns or steep hills.

I've pulled a 10' x 6' sheet of chain link fence to knock down fresh powder, works good for that, but probably wouldn't cut the snowmachine tracks very well.

The interwebs have about 700 guys selling their welded up designs for some $$$...too spendy for me now. If I could weld...well, no more pallet groomer...

I can probably take a pic and e-mail it after this weekend, if the above ramble is too vague. Let me know in a PM.

Karl

Karl,
Your groomer sounds pretty neat- I may have to give pallets a try this winter.
For my strip and trails, I have a drag made from chain link fence that works well for my needs. The fencing was about 4-1/2' wide by 15' long. I folded the length in thirds and bound it together in several places so it stays in a 3-ply mat. I inserted a 2" pipe full-width on the leading edge of the mat which gives the drag plenty of rigidity and weight. I have a chain looped through the pipe a few times with both ends coming forward to the attach point on the snowmachine. The "V" formed by the chain is helpful in guiding the drag around trees and such when grooming narrow trails. The triple ply of the fence tends to pick up and hold a bit of snow, which helps weight the drag sufficiently to smooth out rough stuff.
I tow it with a Skandic 440 long track. It's a pretty good match for the trail and snow conditions we tend to have here. BTW I like a pintle-style tow hook on the Skandic- way better than the little Ski-Doo flapper thingies. I'll see about adding a picture this weekend. Hoping for a good snow year.

-DP

These jet sleds are hard to beat and they're handy for a lot of other things. http://www.shappell.com/sleds.html I pack out the sledding hill with one, just add passengers for ballast.

Thank you all for the ideas. I do believe that since I am in the crop dusting biz and have about 7,000 pallets laying around that will work best for me for now. Maybe a couple of concrete blocks secured on top for ballast as well. Pics would be great!
Since we also have all sorts of welders please describe in more detail how one would assemble one in angle iron......

old school...use a dog sled sideways and pull with local Stinson...

I too have used a section of chain link fence to groom a ski strip for the airplane.....worked great. Also, doesn't take up much space to store off season. The chain link cuts the tops off high spots and drags that snow into the low spots.

Of course, snow conditions vary widely across the country and during the season. I found the chain link solution to work really well all season in northern AK.

MTV

A place in Idaho used 30 gal drums welded inside of a 55 gal drum. In winter, they filled the space in between with water. The ends had bearings mounted, and a cheap angle iron harness going forward. It allowed them to flatten heavy wet snow with an old, under powered snow machine. Drags just loaded up.

It remained useful in the spring when they could fill the entire thing up with water (center section too) and run it over the grass to knock down the dirt rodent tracks with an ATV.

Sam Evans, in Laramie, had a piece of corrugated culvert about 3' in diameter that he welded two straps across the ends w/ a hole in the center, stuck a piece of water pipe through, hooked the ends to a towbar. In Laramie, snow not so wet as other places, however.

Nosedragger wrote:These jet sleds are hard to beat and they're handy for a lot of other things. http://www.shappell.com/sleds.html I pack out the sledding hill with one, just add passengers for ballast.

Minor thread drift: Greg Swingle of OBP infamy modified one of those Jetsleds to serve as a belly pod and the result was an almost perfect fit on his Rans S-7! I remember he had the JETSLED decal stuck on the plane (probably to cover up fabric damage, not that there is anything wrong with that), I think he said they had about 70 lbs of gear in it. In flying alongside it seemed to be low/no drag also.

lesuther wrote:A place in Idaho used 30 gal drums welded inside of a 55 gal drum. In winter, they filled the space in between with water. The ends had bearings mounted, and a cheap angle iron harness going forward. It allowed them to flatten heavy wet snow with an old, under powered snow machine. Drags just loaded up.

It remained useful in the spring when they could fill the entire thing up with water (center section too) and run it over the grass to knock down the dirt rodent tracks with an ATV.

This sounds like a really great idea.

Filing away for future use

I have had really good luck chaining three truck tires in a triangle and towing them behind a sled or quad. It rolls the snow into the hollows and humps very nicely. Let stand/freeze overnight and you should have a good surface. I have seen this done on winter logging haul roads and the surface stands up quiet well to the abuse.

The trick is to not leave any windrows...even little ones. They freeze hard after they have been rolled up and then they are a real pain to get rid of.

Have fun

I have also had good luck with the pallet, piece of chain link fence and ski doo. The longer the pallet the better it is cutting the highs and lows, drag first with the pallet then finish with the piece of fence.

Good luck, Paul

I don't have any ideas for a groomer, but I did get the winter runway mowed in last week. This allows me a straight shot right out of and into the hangar.

I got rid of my first ramp over the summer, at 14' wide it was like threading a needle....taxing uphill, maybe in a cross wind, it looked like 14" wide! Going too slow would result in loss of momentum and no amount of power will get me going again up the slope once fully stopped. So I did a little rock work, hauled some gravel in, and now have a much larger needle.

Back to the groomer: After a big storm, I have a field of unbroken powder, and there is nothing better then laying down first tracks in it! Subsequent takeoffs and landings are made in the same tracks or as close as possible, as a result I have not felt the need to groom. When I land elsewhere, where snow machines have been, I can see the need, their tracks can set up and be rough, and not where I want them . The only tracks at my place are mine, and right where I need them, leading back into the hangar I have found, that if I screw up and run out of steam and end up dead in the water short of the ramp, I can blow my way to the plane using the Kubota mounted snow blower and using some hard points (a bridle setup on the gear legs) I can tow the plane up the ramp. This really is a last resort and usually I need to just wait for the next big blow or snowstorm to fill things in again. I am lucky that the prevailing winds leave my strip perfectly smooth, so for me nature is the best groomer.

courierguy wrote:...I did get the winter runway mowed in last week. This allows me a straight shot right out of and into the hangar.

I think you need a fire pole next to your bed upstairs- you could go from pillow to throttle in under five minutes. Kind of like the Bat Cave!

-DP

I'm one of the few remaining pilots who still feels the need to carry a Flight Guide, like the plane won't fly without it! I don't upgrade it anymore though, anyway, the other day the plastic divider came loose and as I was doing a run up and hadn't latched the door it popped open just as the divider fell out. Instantly it disappeared somewhere behind me, probably lost forever in the belly somewhere where I could not get to it.

Long story short, 10 days later, and before I could get around to tearing the plane apart to find it, I was looking out the bedroom window and there it was, in the window well! Prop blast had blown it there, it had never been in the plane, man that made my day!