And the rest of the story.....
Published on October 28, 2013
Pilgrim welding the front end into place. Ephriam Simms photo
Shoal Cove East man wanted the snowmobile from his youth
The cabbed Bombardier snowmobile was a fixture of the Northern Peninsula for decades.
It was used for mass transit, ambulance service, carrying the mail etc. Some were even used as a school bus.
For George Caines, of Shoal Cove East, the snowmobile was a memory from his youth that he wanted back.
His father and uncle owned two.
He can remember his father’s first one, purchased in 1954. While only four at the time, Caines said he spent years riding around in the wine coloured snow machine.
“The last one they bought was in the 1960s, we would do the mail in the winter, I used it to haul lumber for my house and business garage,” he said. “But as dad was getting older he was looking at getting rid of it, so he asked me if I wanted to take it.
“I had enough on the go that I couldn’t, so it was sold in the early 1980s,” Caines said. “If I had my time back I would never have let it go, that snowmobile was like brand new.”
While gone, it was never forgotten. Thirty years later, Caines wanted another cabbed snowmobile.
But coming across one for sell these days isn’t like it used to be.
On a Roddickton trip, in April, he drove past a Bombardier J-5, an un-cabbed tracked vehicle used in the woods.
The steering controls sit on the transmission, at the back of the machine. It is also three feet shorter than the snowmobile.
After negotiating a price, Caines had a start.
“But I wanted a cab," so he got in contact with the Albert Pilgrim to see if would take on the project.”
Based in St. Anthony, Pilgrim admits he’d never had taken on a project of this nature.
“But I was willing to give it try,” he said. “When he brought it in, I thought how in the world are going to pull this off.”
Pilgrim had a vision of what needed to be done, and a model to go by. Luckily enough his friend Ted Patey had one he could use for measurements in St. Anthony.
So he started out with the cab, using 12 sheets of 4x8-foot sheets of 1/8” metal.
An outline was developed, and to get the metal shaped right, Pilgrim used his hydraulic lift, better known as Ephriam Simms, and they bent and tacked the metal into place.
They even created an air ventilation hatch, operational doors, an escape hatch, installed windows and a windshield.
But that was probably the easier part of the job.
The J-5 had no front end or skis.
Pilgrim developed the whole front end, from shocks and steering mechanisms required, to making skis.
Once done, the snowmobile still needed a way of being driven from the front.
So Pilgrim and Simms extended the controls through the use of rods, and installed pedals, a clutch, and everything else needed next to the driver’s seat.
“We even used the rack-and-pinion steering out of a dodge Dakota,” recalled Pilgrim.
As for the engine, it’s a Chrysler Flat head, which came with the J-5, and is also the original used in the Bombardier snowmobile.
“They have fallen by the wayside because people have dropped in the straight six engine because parts are easier to find and they travel a lot faster,” said Caines. “But I wanted the original engine, and the one in the J-5 seems to be in really good shape.”
Regards to hours, Simms said it wasn’t that many.
“It was finding the time to actually work on the snowmobile,” he said. “There were days we never touched it because we were doing other jobs, but added altogether it took use roughly 160 hours.
On Oct. 19 Caines got to take his snowmobile home, and said it was greeted with excitement from the town.
“People have been coming up just amazed at what the boy’s produced,” he said.
“The amount of craftsmanship and the technical obstacles that they had to get around was unbelievable, they did a fantastic job.
The only thing Caines wants now is snow.
Organizations: Bombardier
Geographic location: Northern Peninsula, Shoal Cove East, St. Anthony Roddickton
