That's Snow Fun

Since the last few posts have been about the white menace, I thought I should make something fun to balance things out.  My good friend called me Friday and invited me to his place to go sledding with the kids Saturday.  I thought this was a great idea and was looking forward to it.  Unfortunately, my wife had already made plans with the kids so I had to beg off at the last minute.  But the idea stuck.

So I spent Saturday afternoon building a sled.  I had an old pair of skis from my high school days that had managed to dodge several dumpster rampages over the last 25 years.  I have actually used them as recently as a few years ago, but mostly they have occupied various corners of various basements, garages, and closets the better part of the quarter century.  I even attempted to sell them in a garage sale and they failed to bring the $15 I was asking.  Remembering what I paid for them-- in hard earned high school cash in a pre-China-dominated economy--I think I would rather throw them away than sell them for $15 anyway.

I wanted to make a sled using the skis for runners.  And even though I was willing to throw them away, or sell them for $15, I did not want to damage them in the conversion.  So I machined two pieces of maple (leftover cabinet parts) to fit into the bindings exactly.  The mill was very handy for this.  I used maple because it is very strong and not grainy, so I figured it would not split as easily as oak.  I made two cross struts from some Douglas fir leftover from the porch columns that I had shipped in from California when I built the house.  I re-sawed the fir into two 2" thick pieces and cut an arch shape on the band saw, just to take a little weight off and add a little to the look.  I machined two 1-1/4" deep dadoes into the struts with the mill to receive oak frames.  The oak was leftover from a recent church addition and was already stained.  I sanded the stain off with my handy-dandy Telex sander--worked like a charm.  I was a little concerned with the red oak splitting under stress, which is why I machined the dadoes so deep--to get extra glue surface area.  The top is made of cedar leftover from the gate of a dumpster enclosure at a medical office building.  Everything is glued with only a few nails to hold the top while the glue set.  The whole shebang clamps into the bindings as one unit, so the skis are still usable for their intended purpose, or if I ever need $15.

The kids and I spent Sunday afternoon at the local sledding hill and had a blast.  All three of us can fit handily on the deck and it zips right along.  I also found that it makes pulling two children up the hill reasonably doable.  Good fun.