May 11, 2006 Riding a motorcycle on snow is a thrilling experience because you can’t see what the front wheel is about run into under the blanket of snow. Accordingly, when snow falls, so do dirt bikes, and the end result is that they get parked in the shed and in some climates, that accounts for roughly half of the year or more, and accounts for enormous wastage … or enormous opportunity. When Tim Jordan moved to Idaho, he missed his dirt bike during the winter months and seven years ago, began a quest to build a conversion for a motorcycle that enabled it to be ridden in the snow. The conversion is now fully developed and will turn a dirt bike into a snoxcycle for US$2895 inside 90 minutes and back again in an hour. The great news is that it handles just like a normal dirt bike, so there’s no learning curve for the average motorcycle rider.
Says Jordan of the Snoxcycle’s handling characteristics, “in soft powder snow, you need to stay close to groomed trails or snowmobile tracks.”
“It does well in snow up to 12 inches deep with a base, but it takes high skill levels to keep moving and unstuck if it gets any deeper.”
“On hard snow in Spring, it’s absolutely awesome! Sleds can't follow were the Snoxcycle can go – tight and twisty trails and sidehills. In most other conditions, it’s great! Groomed trails and whooped out trails are a blast. It jumps like a dirt bike and feels quite similar to riding the sand, but it’s much more stable.
“The rear track developed to work with the motorcycle is 121 x 6 x 1.25 inches. In terms of weight, the conversion kit adds approximately 24 lbs with Snoxcycle ski runners (intermediate to hard conditions) and 18 lbs with the standard Simmon's ski (soft conditions). The total weight of the kit is 74 lbs vs. 50 lbs for the stock parts that are replaced.
“The conversion has now been fitted to a wide range of dirt bikes, and fits all current four-stroke MX and off-road motorcycles over 400cc and two-strokes over 250cc. The basic kit can be interchangabed from bike to bike requiring only the purchase of a specific bike adapter kit costing US$350 for the second bike. There’s a kit under development for smaller bikes down to mini-bike size, but it’s not commercially ready just yet.
“Our first production run of the kits sold out this spring, so were upping quantities and the next run will be much bigger, and available in October.”
International distribution and any sales enquiries should be directed to Tim here.
