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Old 02-02-2005, 10:45 AM   #1
Rattlesnake Gal
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Arrow Model T Snowmobile Article & Event

Here is an interesting article from that excellent newspaper, the Weirs Times and something fun to take in this coming Saturday.
Thanks Roger! Very enjoyable.

Model-T Snowmobiles Coming Home to Birthplace

by Roger Amsden
News Correspondent West Ossipee –


Some of the finest remaining examples of the first-ever snowmobiles will be on display in West Ossipee at the homecoming rally on Saturday, Feb. 5 sponsored by the Model T Snowmobile Club of America. As many as 40 of the Model Ts, sporting double rows of rear tires affixed with belt-like chains and skis up front for steering, will be at the event, which will be held at the intersection of Rte. 25 and Rte. 16, just a few hundred feet from the site of a factory which during the 1920s turned out some 25,000 conversion kits which transformed Model Ts into snowmobiles.
Mike Hashem of the Ossipee Historical Society said that snowmobiles will start arriving Friday afternoon and that the all-day event will be headquartered at the Whittier House Restaurant.
Rides will be offered to the public throughout the day.
The vehicles may be a lot bigger and slower than today's snowmobiles but the principles which underlie their operation are the same, a moving belt for traction and skis for maneuvering the front end of the machine through the snow. Of course the four-cylinder, 20 horsepower engines are no match modern versions, moving, at the very best, at a top speed of 15 miles per our.
But they still get the job done and performed many useful functions in the 1920’s when plowed roads as we know them were virtually non-existent and conventional wheeled vehicles were often sidelined until warm weather returned.

The conversion kids, which were used to adapt the Model T’s were the invention of Virgil D. White, who owned a Ford garage in West Ossipee, which is now the home of Johnson’s Oil.

White, who had an eighth grade education and whose first job was a logger, started working on his snowmobile around 1910. In addition to selling and servicing Model T’s during the summer and into the fall, he also drove tourists around the area.
White and his mechanic, looking for a vehicle that could be used year-round, decided to put wooden runners on the front of a Ford Model T and tractor treads on a double set of wheels at the rear.
In 1913 White patented his “Snowmobile”, and started selling complete units for $750 and the conversion kits for $400. The wooden runners were five feet long and eight inches wide while the caterpillar-like tracks were eight inches wide.
Sales started slowly and the kits weren’t in big demand initially, with only 75 sold on 1923. But once people actually saw them in action, sales jumped and in the years that followed, as many as 2,500 kids were sold each year, with demand dropping off late in the decade as the use of snow plows became virtually universal across the snow belt.
White may have coined the work snowmobile and been smart enough to get the name legally protected, but he wasn’t the first person to build a machine capable of traveling through the snow.
That was actually the Lombard log hauler, designed and built in Waterville, Maine., in 1908. It was a large cumbersome machine that resembled a steam locomotive, only it had a half-track design and front skis with the driver sitting in a sear forward of the steam engine and just above the skis.
One of the 19-ton machines can be seen at the White Mountain Central Railroad in Lincoln, next to Clarks Trading Post. It is owned by David A. Clark, who bought it in the late 1970’s and gradually restored it over a 20-year period at the railroad station’s workshop.
The Model T Ford snowmobiles were very useful for doctors making house calls and for rural postmen delivering mail.
At a Model T snowmobile rally held at Benton’s Sugar Shack in Thornton four years ago one of the more unusual models on display was a 1922 Model T whose back and top were enclosed with wood. It is owned by Lenny Smith Sr. Of Townsend, Mass., and was once used to deliver mail in Sault Center, Minnesota.
Smith said that he purchased the snowmobile from Edmund Heine if Gilford several years ago. He said that Heine had bought the vehicle at an estate auction in New Jersey in the 1980s for only a dollar with the goal of restoring it.
Smith, who helped found the Model-T Snowmobile Club of America eleven years ago, said that interest in the old machines is growing rapidly. “We started out with one snowmobile at our first show and had 38 people show up. Now we have hundreds of people show up and have 124 members,” said Smth.
Townsend will be the site of an antique Model T snowmobile exhibit on Sunday, Feb. 13.

Last edited by Rattlesnake Gal; 02-02-2005 at 01:19 PM.
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