Small Riders, Big Sleds

Has anyone else noticed that the sport of snowmobiling is one of a kind? It is a family sport that gets kids engaged at a very young age and keeps them engaged until the kids reach middle school, but then the sport struggles to keep up with them as they grow. It’s commonplace to see kids as young as 3-4 years old riding on sleds that are small enough that a toddler could probably fit on them (looking at you, Arctic Cat Kitty Cat). In fact, the first sled our son Jack rode was a 1981 Arctic Cat Kitty Cat

It doesn’t take long for kids to outgrow the Kitty Cat. By the time they are graduating from Kindergarten, it’s likely they are too big to ride it. But the sport of snowmobiling has a solution with sleds like the Polaris XCR 120 and the Skidoo Mini Z, which debuted in the late 1990’s. The Polaris is still around today, effectively unchanged, and has become a staple in backyards across the entire snowbelt. The more modern offerings come from Arctic Cat and Yamaha with the ZR 200s and the Sno Scoot and will accommodate kids for a few more years before these sleds too are outgrown – but this is where the sport begins to struggle keeping up with kids. As kids continue growing up and inevitably transition from elementary school and look towards middle school and even high school, there aren’t many options for these adolescent riders. In fact, there are only two options to choose from today, offered by Polaris and Arctic Cat: the Polaris Indy Evo and the Arctic Cat Blast. Where the Arctic Cat is a ground-up new platform with a new powertrain designed specifically for this application, the Polaris is built off an existing platform that has been transformed into a youth-sized snowmobile capable of delivering the ergonomics needed for a young-but-growing rider. Clearly the manufacturers took distinctly different approaches to developing these two machines, but both are aimed at newer riders that are small in stature.

Both are solid offerings and will do a nice job bridging the gap left between the small sleds and full-size sleds. But if you already have a sled or aren’t in the mood to drop $6,200+ for the Polaris or $8,200+ for the Arctic Cat, all is not lost! With a little help from the aftermarket, there are simple things that can be done to make your existing full-size sled easier for a smaller and younger kid to ride, many of which have been proven out in racing.

On the snocross track, it’s common for kids to begin riding full size 600cc race sleds at 8 years old, so changes are almost always required to accommodate the ergonomics of these young riders, and fortunately, the same approach to fitting sleds to riders can be applied to both racers and trail riders alike. What we’ve learned is that the changes you can read about in an owner’s manual (suspension and spring settings, just the starting point – they’re table stakes. To really make a sled work for a smaller rider, there are changes you can make that you won’t find published anywhere in a manual that can make a big difference – and that’s what this blog post is all about.

FLOORBOARD RISERS

Floorboard risers aren’t readily available in the aftermarket for snowmobiles, but they are an easy DIY project, and more importantly, make a big impact to a young rider’s ability to gain leverage over the sled. This is something that snocross families have been doing for their riders since the beginning of time. I’ve seen solutions as simple as lag-bolting a 2×4 to the floorboard, and solutions as sophisticated as fabricating a new floorboard out of a spare chassis and attaching that. For our son Jack, we created something in-between that required zero fabrication, just bolts, spacers, and a stair-step for a semi-truck, of all things:

SEAT MODIFICATIONS

Oftentimes on modern snowmobiles, the seat is too big for small riders, and it prevents them from being able to lean and transfer their weight to control the sled. Modifying the seat will address that problem. This is a category of change that, like floorboard risers, is very common on the snocross track, but not common on the trail.  You might cringe at the thought of cutting up a snowmobile seat, but it’s not that bad, and requires no special tools. The goal of this effort is to shorten the seat to get the riders knee-height closer to the top of the seat. This improves their ability to use their body to control the sled. On older sleds like my 1995 XCR 440, there probably isn’t much that’s needed. But on newer sleds like a 2013+ Indy 600 for instance, the seat height can be much higher than a youth rider’s knee. This is important because if the knee is below the seat, the rider can’t get their hips very far off the centerline of the sled, which reduces their ability to control the sled. Narrowing the seat as well can complement the shorter seat as well, especially if you notice that the seat width is causing the rider to stand bow-legged.

In order to modify your seat you need to pull the vinyl cover off the seat, which entails removing about one million staples from the underside of the seat (Note that not all seats have removable covers. If you don’t have a removable cover, don’t modify your seat until you can verify that the aftermarket makes a seat cover for your sled!)

With the cover off you’ll see the foam that you need to trim. You can use a handful of different tools to cut the foam – my preferred tool is a hot knife, but prior to having that, I used our turkey carver from the kitchen (shhhhhh!). Sounds odd, but these work remarkably well for cutting foam. Note that you may need to be discreet about taking it out to the garage – trust me on this – do not ‘proclaim’ to your household that you are taking the beloved thanksgiving heirloom out to the garage; nothing good can come from that. But don’t worry, if you can’t get the Hamilton Beach out to the garage, a Sawzall will also get the job done with a fine tooth, long blade. Regardless of your tool-of-choice, simply trim and measure, and once you are in a good place, reinstall your seat cover (again, with about one million staples). Let me know if you would like to see a step-by-step of seat modifications in the comments below – happy to put one together in a future post. After a couple of nights in the garage, this is what we ended up with:

WARMTH AND RIDER PROTECTION

This one is obvious, but our smaller riders don’t have the same size internal furnace (or insulation!) that we do, so we need to we make a few simple adjustments to help the kids stay warmer longer, starting with hands. At a bare minimum, have functional hand warmers on the bars. If you have swapped out bars to something aftermarket, but cautious with aluminum bars – they absorb a TON of heat that the warmers are generating. We also put hand guards on our sleds – Fuzion guards from Powermadd happen to be one of our favorites.

We use them primarily to protect against roost while racing, but they make a huge improvement in wind protection on the trail, especially if sporting a short windshield. For very cold trail days, I highly recommend running gauntlets.

Gauntlets keep all the heat generated by the warmer around their hand, while also protecting the hand from wind and debris. They are tedious to get your hand into sometimes but are great for the really cold days.– something like the Klim gauntlets shown above

This sums up the changes we made to our sled to get ready for the 2021/22 season, and with any luck, this will help our rider with sled control. Ultimately, we’re scaling the sled down to improve control today, but also to prevent kids from forming bad habits that can lead to unsafe situations on the trail or on the track in the future. With some small adjustments to full size sleds, we can set kids up to build good riding habits that will last a lifetime. I want to hear from you – what changes do you make to sleds for your young riders? Post in the comments below!