Over the last few years my son "Larry" has enjoyed tagging along to a few vintage snowmobile shows. To start, his name really isn’t Larry, but we’ll call him that thanks to Deerekid9. A year or so ago I decided that I'd keep an eye out for one of the direct drive Deere models and turn it into a father / son restoration project for us. I was sort of back and forth as to what model......decisions decisions. I really liked the idea of a Sprintfire, but thought a Spitfire might be easier to find and with the higher build numbers I wouldn't have reservations about him riding it. Well.....then one day I noticed a Facebook post from a good friend and fellow Jdsleds.com member Ed (cledussnow77). Ed was looking to downsize and one of the sleds he had for sale was an 83 Snowfire. Ed lives about 45 minutes from me so I contacted him and made arrangements to look at this sled. After looking it over I thought it would be a really good project. My biggest concern was that the carb was stuck. I speculated that vermin had made a home in the carb and it would be scrap.
Here are a few photos from when we brought the sled home.
As soon as the sled was off the trailer the first thing that needed to be addressed was to remove the rancid fuel. This has to be the worst smelling sled that I have drug home. You could smell it sitting on the trailer with the cap down. So we drained the fuel and gave the sled a quick bath. Here's what the fuel looked like.
And here’s a photos after the bath
We would later discover that the engine was full of fuel and was leaking past the PTO side crank seal. This proved to be quite the garage air freshener. Anyhow, after a quickie clean job, we tried to tackle the carb. I was pretty nervous about this stuck carb problem, not being really familiar with the Snowfires, I was concerned that I may never find the correct carburetor if this one was scrap. After removing the air box we were pleased to see that it had not become a rodent hotel and further investigation revealed that a leaking inlet needle had crusted up the carburetor slide so bad that the slide was stuck. So we decided to soak the entire carb in carb cleaner.
I know the directions on the can say to soak for 1 hour, but I tend to soak them over night, just seem to have better results. The next morning was a Sunday morning and we had a little family adventure planned so we wouldn't have much time to work on the sled. When my son went out in the morning he squeezed the throttle and came running back in the house and said "dad it's moving!!”. He had to show me so I grabbed the camera and snapped this photo.
Now my garage doesn't always look this messy. I've had a lot on my plate recently, even though I don't like working on more than one sled at a time we have been working on all three sleds in the photo. The middle Liquifire is getting the motor freshened up and the one in the rear received new paint on the skis, new carbides, and a clutch rebuild.
So back to the Snowfire, I decided we were going to tackle this project in three phases. Get the motor running, go through the drive line, and fix the sled cosmetically. Once I was confident about the carburetor we ordered the crank seals and fuel system parts to get the motor running. Here are a few photos from the night my son removed the motor.
Unfortunately, I wrote most of the above back in late July / early August which is when this project stalled out due to some pretty serious medical issues with several family members. The worst resulted in Larry losing his Grandmother. We are just now getting back into this project and finally tore the engine down this weekend. Of course I forgot to take photos of the dis-assembly of the motor, but I’ll try my best to keep this updated. More than likely the progress will be really slow.
. Brock
