I got really inspired to try something out yesterday, after discovering Snowsk8r, Pedal BMX‘s sister site: I wanted to rig myself up something in the general spirit of a snowskate from miscellaneous recycled parts.

If you are not familiar with snowskating, just check out the following embedded video to get the gist of things.

YouTube – Chairlift Skeptics… A Snowskate Flick

An appropriate short description would likely be: the newest surefire way to injure yourself while laughing your head off. :p

Looking at the various kinds of snowskates out there, there seems to be three general types:

• simple boards with an oversized tail and nose, referred to as single deck
• what looks like a standard skateboard made out of marine plywood, with a mini snowboard underneath, aka bideck
• and the same, but with multiple mini-skis (2 to 4), with or without suspension

The easy way out for me would have of course been to just grab an old skateboard and gone for it as is, but my kids and I have done that many times in the past and although it’s fun, there is just not enough kick to it. What became obvious was that the elevation from the ground that trucks and wheels provide was what I was looking for in the rig.

After finding a photo of the now out-of-production Danny Kass Snowskate model, it became apparent that simply joining 2 old skateboards might just do the trick nicely, at least to mess around with and see if there’s any sense in spending more time or money on getting setup.

So that’s what I just did. You can see the basic steps I took by browsing to the photo set of the build process I uploaded on Flickr, or you can use the following embedded slideshow (full screen mode will let you see the attached instructions).

Voilà! Nothing too fancy, but it promises to be a blast to at least try out. :)

The kids and I will go do just that shortly.

Updated 2009-01-18: I’ve added some picts of our test run to the slideshow. Fun stuff! As expected, it works best with heavily packed snow. Not a problem in Montreal. ;)