Building a "Smitty sled" tranport system
 

I love to build stuff... I've enginered and built the entire coolant delivery system in out plant here at work, I've enginered and built the coolant recycling system here as well... I've built hundreds of jigs in my home shop for building plugs made jigs for cutting molding and trim.. why I never thought of this myself is a mystery.... credit goes to a Gent. that goes by the screen name of "Smitty" on Ice shanty...
The original he made uses 2X6" risers, attached to a set of ski's by screwing up through the ski's.. the cross braces were of 2X4" construction and a mortise was cut in each riser to accept it... each riser was pinned by installing a long carriage bolt into the cross member and hammering it in place ( face down..).. his used no wheels..

I built mine also with 2X6" risers, but rather than drilling through the ski's, I cut a longer length of wood and glued and screwed it to the bottom of the riser, then , glued it with high strength polyurethain adhesive and screwed it from the top....I used a 2X6 board for the rear support and cut a 3- 1/2" tenion in it to fit a like sized mortise in the riser...IMHO, this modification allowed for less racking and a wider rear platform because my auger would be risding there.. the front cross member is 2X4" with a 2 -3/4" tenion cut into the 2X4 with a like size mortise in the riser... a 6" length of 1/4 steel rod was glued into the mortise in the riser with gorilla glue rather than having it protrude from my cross member... I sometimes walk or cross lengthy patches of black top or frozen earth, I needed a easily removed wheel system... I fitted a length of 1/2" electrical conduit with a 1/2" clevis pin, a small bushing copper bushing ( cut from a length of scrap pipe and split with a hack saw) was inserted over the pin and the pin/bushing assembelly was inserted to a predetermined depth to acomodate a set of wheels I pirated from a junk lawn mower ( some clown actauly put it in our dumpster one morning last week) once in place the conduit/bushing/pin combor was drilled and a 1/8" cold roll pin was driven in place... holes drilled in the riser accodate the axel and wheels, wheels are held in place by a spring pin through the clevis.. the axel and wheels take only a moment to remove or install and can stoer in the sled taking up very little room...

My original thought was to build this for my 2 man Shapell portable.. but the sytem is so strong i pile on all my crap... life just got alot eaiser... I've done an " all terain " test with the loaded cart.. so far.. so good.. well except the neighbors now KNOW I'm not a well man...:uhuh:

And the whole thing comes appart with a few whacks of the hand on the underside of the cross members... and takes up no more room than a pair of ski's with boots...

Nice job as usual Joe.
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