Give your sled new life with heavy duty runners!
Most Snowmobile sleds or toboggans have plastic runners on the bottom, which provide protection from ice, gravel, dirt and the grinding of everyday use. The runners are designed to be sacrificial, and they wear down before the "tub" of the toboggan does. If you let your runners wear out completely, the bottom of your sled will start to wear out.
Whether you have a Snowdog sled, a Pelican, Equinox, Koenders or other brand, the runners are usually replaceable, and it's not hard to replace them yourself! If you have a buddy that can help you, a drill, and some patience, you can do this.
Why replace the runners?
Runners are designed to be replaceable, and replacing them at the right time saves you from having to buy a whole new sled. After all, you don't buy a new car just because your tires are getting worn down, do you?
Our Snowdog sleds have runners that are made of HDPE (high density polyethylene). HDPE is usually quite resistant to impact, and works well in cold weather, but it does wear down over time. Snowdog does sell replacement runners, and they're not very expensive!
We have been using the same demo sleds since we started selling Snowdogs four years ago. To be honest, we weren't very careful about where we went. There may have been pavement involved. Nonetheless, these sleds held up very well. But as you can see, these runners are done. In fact, we noticed that we were grinding down the screws too. Yikes! That explains the sparks, I guess. We thought this might be a good opportunity to test some new runners on our sleds, so we could share our findings with you, and answer your questions.
You have options.
The Snowdog replacement runners, as I mentioned, are made of HDPE, which are great. They lasted a good long time. We didn't have any real problems with them, and they did a great job of protecting our sleds. They didn't peel off or separate like some sled runners I've seen. Kudos to Snowdog for building a good quality sled! If you're happy with the performance of the Snowdog runners, we can get you new ones, that's easy enough, and they're reasonably priced.
You have other options though! If you want to want to upgrade your sled with even better runners, we recommend UHMW runners. They provide much more resistance to abrasion than the original runners, but are still flexible and easy to install. We wanted to see this for ourselves, so we installed the new UHMW runners on one of our demo sleds. Here's the new look:
What an improvement! It took us about 30 minutes, a few new screws (#8 x 3/4" Truss Head screws are included with our kits!) and it adds years to the life of the sled!
We liked it so much, we replaced the runners on one of our Pelican sleds too. Same easy installation process, same great results. If your sled runners are showing signs that they're nearing the end of their useful life, replace them quickly and easily.
Our sled runner kits come complete with 5 runner strips pre-cut and beveled on both ends, and 40 screws, along with some helpful installation instructions, which you are free to ignore completely.
