Diesel Snow Mobiles for sale
 

Not related etc etc

https://www.gcsurplus.ca/mn-eng.cfm?...1&sf=ferm-clos

Location: Yellowknife, NT :giveup

Yellowknife is the headquarters for the Northern military region. It is both a dreaded and a highly sought after posting. If you like snowmobiling and ice fishing , well you can do it 6 months straight ! I have friends who were posted there saying it was the best times in their lives. Others, whom i suspect of not enjoying winter have said it is not fun . In summer there are the bugs. I have always enjoyed shorter stints in those more remote Northern areas and enjoyed every minute before going back South. Anyway , a diesel snowmobile ? Who the hell would want that ? Any insight ?

A limited production diesel snowmobile in arctic conditions....what could be wrong with that?


I would suggest the snowmobiles themselves are problematic. I can't think of any fleet of machinery that DND has sold (with operating hours only in the double digits) that is only 3 or 4 years old. Mind you, I can think of a couple fleets that should have been sold off after that time period.



I have a friend posted up there. I'll contact him and see what the story is on these machines.

My own experience in the arctic (as a mechanic....I was up in Alert for a boxtop about 36 years ago, and also up to whitehorse for an ex a few years after that) was just over 20 years ago when the battery I was tasked to went to repulse bay. We brought up a fleet of the Bombardier Alpine snowmobiles. While the locals appreciated the hauling capacity of these machines, they were not in local use. All the machines up there were primarily Yamaha or Kawasaki, which had no problems starting. For the Canadian machines, it required removing the carb at night and bringing it into the tent. In the morning, you warmed it up, quickly re-installed it, and used the pull start to get things going. Forget about the electric start.....that was a fantasy.



As a mechanic, I had brought one of those trigger propane torches along. When they could not get a machine going, I would bring the torch into the tent, warm up the cylinder over the coleman stove, place it in my parka and head out to the machine. By preheating the intake manifold and carb with the propane torch, good results were achieved. The reason for putting the torch on the coleman stove? Propane does not vaporize at -30 and we were way way below those temps.



If you google Dew D900 Snowmobile there seems to be a lot of reading available for them. From DEW:



https://www.dewengineering.com/case-...900-snowmobile




I would think that these diesel machines would be very reliant on glowplugs. The army went to a one fuel concept back in the 90s, which meant diesel. There were exceptions, and this would appear to be an attempt to meet that concept, along with the availability of JP as Robert mentions. . Note the ads for the machines state they were pulled from service in 2017, so most likely they have one season of operation, but possibly up to three.

Robert.

It was not that long ago diesel fuel at the local gas station was selling 20 cents or more per litre below regular gasoline, but it is now close to 20 cents above premium gas in some locations.

Perhaps when the diesel snowmobile was first thought of, it was still a cheaper fuel and that factored into the decision to build them as well. But you are right, preheat for ignition at minus 40??? Yikes!!!

David

I don't think the cost of the fuel is much of a consideration, but rather the logistics (diesel uses a lot less fuel than a gasoline vehicle) and the safety.


A good read on the trials of these machines: http://cradpdf.drdc-rddc.gc.ca/PDFS/...804709_A1b.pdf


It may well be that these machines were used for the trial ex and then disposed of. Canada bought 20 and there are currently 11 listed on CADC.

Over here, the experience of Snowmobiles is quite limited... :)

Looking at the Dew Engineering brochure, it looks like a towbar-like device on the rear of the snowmobiles that might be capable of attaching a pintle hook. Is this correct? And would they tow a wheeled trailer, or sleds?

The DND has special purpose built sleds for behind snow machines. When up North, however, the Inuit's qamutiik are much longer so have a greater cargo capacity over the DND ones.



There is mention that the nose of the diesel machines are quite heavy. As such, they are more likely to get stuck in softer snow. My limited arctic experience was that the snow in the arctic is not the same snow we have in the South. The ground ranges from very thin cover of snow with rocks peeking out, and where there are drifts, they are generally quite hard packed.

The Inuit have something like 30 different names for snow depending on its characteristics.

I found that warm snow crunches, cold snow squeaks, but in the arctic really really cold snow chirps. The oddest snow I saw was the layered variety. There would be a blizzard, followed by wind which picked up exposed dirt, blizzard, dirt, blizzard dirt...the end result being snow with the consistency of dense styrofoam but really cool (sorry for the pun) layers of white and chocolate milk brown. Then there was the June snowstorms accompanied with 80 km/hr winds yet the 3/4" long mosquitos could still land on exposed skin, bite and blow away.

Yes Bruce, things are especially different in the arctic, where you hear the echoes of the ice cracking.


We were in our tent at a new location when one of the Bombers (artillery speak for a Corporal) came in to relate to us something new he had discovered about the arctic. It was extremely cold outside, but he had to relieve himself. That meant removing your arctic snot-mitts, lifting the parka somewhat, and fumbling around blindly with two layers of zippers in order to urinate. Whilst urinating, he realized he could not hear the yellow liquid hitting the ground. "Just another unique anomaly of the arctic" he thought to himself. As he redressed himself, he discovered that one of his arctic mitts, dangling from the dummy strings, was the cause of the lack of noise....he had filled his right mitt.

Great story. What I found was that the need to pee was well constrained by either the difficulty in getting to it (god damn layers) or the shrivelled size (because of the cold) making it difficult. Contrary to public perception, the stream does survive unfrozen to the ground even at 40 below.

What I did take seriously was the idea that you could walk 20 feet in a blizzard and get turned around and freeze to death. Sometimes putting the garbage out was a life threatening adventure.

For a construction job we were using grease. The blizzard was impregnating it with snow at such a rate that it went pale green and resembled the consistency of cake icing. I think on that job I got both mosquito bites and frostbite.