View Single Post
  #5  
Old 13-01-19, 18:48
rob love rob love is offline
carrier mech
 
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Shilo MB, the armpit of Canada
Posts: 7,521
Default

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.
Reply With Quote