Wolfgang Reinelt - Build yourself an arctic sled

outdoor @ wolfgang-reinelt.de	build yourself an arctic sled

Welcome to the Mac Gywer page! For my 1999 snowshoe tour I decided to use a sled to pull, rather than a pack to carry. Advantages are for instance that you are able to carry more luggage with you (although you do not really want to, but you have to...), and that yoru back is not wet from the pack. I built the arctic sled quite close the descriptions of these guys here:

Mark Harris,
Johan Lundström ,
Erik Gisslar: picture 1 , picture 2 , picture 3.

Thank you guys for your ideas and descriptions! For additional info I browsed the websites of Fjellpulken A/S in Norway.The main difference between these two kinds of sleds are that the professional ones are bigger, heavier, more expensive, whereas the home-made ones are based on a sled for children and can carry a dufflebag or a pack of 90 liters or so, just fine for shorter tours in the winter. Not to talk about the fun you can have when you build it and the fun your friends will have when they see it the first time. Well, it is pretty obvious what to do (from the figure), once you have bought the following:

a (rather flat) children's plastic sled
some kind of not too flexible plastic pipe (resistent to the temperatures you expect): 2 x 2m + 1m
nylon rope: 2 x 3m (thicker, inside the plastic pipe to pull the sled, marked blue)
nylon rope: 6m (thinner, for interconnection, marked green)
carabines: 2 or 4
cordura/nylon straps: 2 x 3m, 1.5m
cable binder, tape, knife, 1 hour time, a cup of coffee.
(Something else? I think that's it....)

As you can imagine, the red box depicted above is supposed to be the sled, and the right hand side is where you pull. A couple of thoughts, you might want to consider:

Make the holes "D" in the sled and fix the longer straps. They will hold your pack/duffle bag on the sled.
The holes marked with "P" (= P-holes?) are the ones where you fix the thicker nylon rope to pull the sled. If you fix it with a knot, it's a good idea to mantle the rope with some tape in order to protect it. You may as well take a carabine. Hence, there is no fixed connection between the plastic pipe and the sled in points "L", it's just a loose link.
Now, you can fix the short plastic pipe between the points "CB" to gain stability. You can fix them with cable binder or with thinner nylon rope. This should happen somewhere in the middle of the (longer) pipe, but you might consider to fix your isolation mats between "CB" and "C" (as visible on the figure below).
The extra nylon ropes between "P" and "CB" give you some more stability when pulling in uneven landscape, which is the case every now and then.
It is quite important that the two ropes/pipes have the same length in order to pull the sled even. So you better have a beer before you do this nanometer-cut.... (oops, this was not on the shopping list above)
At point "C" you may then fix carabines which you connect to the pulling device you intend to' wear'. I simply bought the harness from Fjellpulken.
Allright....now the idea of combining plastic pipe and nylon rope is that you pull the sled with the rope, but the pipe prevents you from getting bloody feet when going downhill. This works to some extend 8-) so:
Make the hole "B" in the sled and fix the shorter strap as a sort of emergency strap. When going down very steep, the kind guy going just behind you may take it and be the brake. You owe her/him a beer in the evening for doing this job.

Detail photos are available. Please click on a thumbnail to view the fullsize image.