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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JF Quinnelly who wrote (57058)	12/14/2000 6:05:28 AM
From: Crocodile	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

It's before dawn, and I'm looking out on new fallen snow... lots of it... Will definitely be getting the snowshoes and X-country skis out to stick in the snowbank at the bottom of the front porch where they'll be handy to slap on when we want to go walking or skiing back in the fields or forest of our farm. All of this snow is reminding me of a kind of crazy time in my life... fun stuff. My dad was the plant manager at a large Montreal-based snowmobile company back in the late 1960s. They weren't so much into the recreational type machines back then... the machines that he worked on would be the kind that people used to go into the bush to get into hydro installations, microwave towers, etc... The machines weren't designed for high speed, but for maximum draft capabilities... so that they could haul equipment on sleds. There was a lot of emphasis on power and maneuverability, etc... For my brothers and I, the fun part of my dad's job was that he used to bring home all kinds of new machines that were just in the R&D phase of production. My family always referred to these as the "Flintstone Machines" because some of them were really wild and crude-looking. Mechanically, they were fully functional machines... almost at the end of design development, but from a....uhm... cosmetic...point of view...they were pretty bizarre... Real "Road Warrior" stuff... The had metal shrouds and heat shielding all over them...usually crudely sprayed with that dull silver "aluminum paint". Aside from their appearance, the one thing that was pretty bad about the Flintstone Machines was the noise that they made... because they weren't permanently shrouded and the shielding would rattle, flap and shake insanely when the engine was running.. and, as well... because they generally had nothing more than a rudimentary exhaust system at that stage of development. Consequently, it was practically impossible to communicate with someone when you were anywhere near one... Back in those days, we lived in a small town outside of the city and also had a cottage in a remote area. Ideal locations for test driving snowmobiles. Most winter weekends, my dad used to bring machines home in a trailer... sometimes 2 or 3 at a time, so that he could put them through their paces in the bush somewhere...going up and down ravines hauling sleds loaded with weights. Seeing how well they could negotiate deep snow in a forest... just those kinds of things. I grew up learning how to operate snowmobiles when I was quite young... I would have been driving one of these machines back when I was about 10.... which seems kind of bizarre to me now...but I was a strong kid and also very serious and responsible, so my dad probably never even thought twice about teaching me how to operate one when I asked if I could. BTW, these machines were NOT easy to drive back in those days... They were very heavy...having a 2-piece body...the front part looking a lot like a "miniature tank", and the back part consisting of a long sled affair with a seat on it that was set on a welded frame over wide hardwood skis. The sled part was long...it could easily carry 2 or 3 adults, and had a flip up seat which you could stow tools underneath. Because of the size and weight of these machines, when they were moving quickly, they were easy to steer, but when you were going very slowly through a dense forest, they required quite a lot of upper body strength to steer... but I did okay at it... and my dad and I had a lot of interesting little adventures when we were out with the machines... One rather obnoxious peculiarity about these two-piece machines was that they could give you a wild ride if you drove them too fast over a bumpy area with mogul-type snowdrifts. The person sitting at the front of the seat-sled was usually okay, but the last person...if there were 3 on it... really had to hang on to the person in front, or to the seat itself. I remember seeing my brother fall victim to this little design fault more than once...usually because he repeatedly neglected to hold onto the seat. On one particular occasion, he was sitting behind me while my dad sat at the front driving the machine... We were moving at a decent clip but suddenly hit a large lump in the snow on an old logging road that we were travelling along. The sled bucked... not unlike a horse, come to think of it. I was okay, but I caught a glimpse of my brother's foot kicking by the side of my face and, looking back quickly, I saw him rising through the air... propelled as if from an ejection seat... only to be unceremoniously dumped on his butt in the deep snow, while we sped onwards.... I started yelling at my dad to stop but, of course, he couldn't hear my voice over the sound of the engine, so he kept on going... I finally resorted to pounding on his back with my hand to get him to turn around... but by this time, we were probably about a quarter of a mile away... No harm done though.. My brother was fine... just covered with snow and a bit worried that we hadn't seen him fall off and would leave him sitting on the road...