Original Post by Charles Plueddeman

Who could resist buying this sweet little Lynx?

As a key component of my personal Economic Stimulus Program, the sale of my 1973 Arctic Cat Lynx was my top priority at Waconia this year. Unfortunately, this kept me anchored at the WOBLE (Waconia Or Bust Leaf Spring Expedition) compound on the ice from the time we arrived just after the trail ride until the moment we packed up to leave at about 5:30 p.m. Fellow WOBLE riders would amble off for the swap meet or to watch the races, come back an hour later, and find me still sitting with the Lynx, FOR SALE sign perched behind the blue windshield.

"Can’t believe you have not sold that sled yet…"

I thought it was sold on Friday night, when I got a call from someone driving to Waconia who saw my ad on Vintagesleds.com. Call when you get to the lake, he said, it’s just what I’m looking for. I called, but he never stopped by on Saturday. You know how that goes. And on Saturday a couple of other people showed real interest, but had to look some more, or see if it would fit in their truck, or ditch their wife and come back.

I really wanted this sled gone. I’d already emotionally detached myself from the Lynx. I’d come up with rational reasons to sell it, and I was going to stick to the plan. Even if it was my first Cat. Even if it did run like a champ during the 38-mile WOBLE ride. Even though the JB Weld patch was holding on the bottom of the fuel tank. The cord was cut.

Occasionally WOBLE rider Kyle Wainer would sidle up to me and make some outrageously low offer for the Lynx, and remind me that I was missing the swap meet. And if someone stopped to look at it, he was the first to yell over a truck hood, "Charlie, did you sell that piece of junk yet? Tell them about the bad track?"

About mid-afternoon, WOBLE rider Matt Pfankuch says, "I know a guy who would probably pay your price for the Lynx. He wants to race in that one-lunger class for guys over 55 years old. But he lives in Princeton."

I don’t want to fool around getting the Lynx to Princeton. I decide to hold out. An hour later, I ask Matt if he can call the guy in Princeton. Matt has to call his wife, get her to find the phone number in his shop, and call him back. By then, Matt’s already driving home. But my phone rings at about five o’clock.

"Hey, I called him, and guess where he is?" said Matt. "He’s in Waconia, at the gas station ready to head home. But he wants to see the Lynx so he’s coming back to the lake."

A few minutes later this gentleman calls me. They won’t let him drive on the ice, so he’s walking over. By now all the other WOBLE sleds are loaded, and the Lynx is resting alone on the ice. When my buyer arrives, I know that I saw him walk past earlier in the day, because he’s wearing a distinctive cap. I guess the Lynx was invisible, parked in the same row with all the glamorous WOBLE iron. I give him the walk-around, let him take a test drive, and throw in the brand-new spare belt to sweeten the deal. In 10 minutes I’m driving the Lynx up to his truck, folding his cash into my pocket and shaking hands.

I never should have sold that Lynx.

I stood straddling its fine, leopard-pattern seat, holding in my mittened right hand the handlebar of my 1969 Arctic Cat Panther, suddenly attached to the snowmobile only by the throttle cable, like a severed arm clinging to its shoulder by a thin tendon. Staring through my goggles in disbelief, I started to go into vintage snowmobile shock. Because when it’s your sled that breaks on the trail, all you can think about how dumb you were to pull backward on the handlebars of a 1969 Panther, which everyone knows are weak to begin with and yours were already welded once so you should have been careful. Next you consider the prospect of leaving your baby alone by the side of the trail. And then flash to how hard it’s going to be to get the parts to fix it. And what it’s going to cost.

This is why you should never ride vintage alone. Because when another rider’s sled breaks, you can set to work fixing it, free of emotion. And while I struggled to snap out the fog of despair, my fellow riders were already hatching a plan to get me back on the trail.

This is the spirit of the WOBLE, the Waconia Or Bust Leafspring Expedition, a 70-mile round-trip vintage ride from rural Prior Lake, Minn., to Waconia to attend the annual vintage sled extravaganza organized by Midwest Vintage Snowmobile Shows. The WOBLE is the brainstorm of my friend and Arctic Cat Pride editor John Sandberg, who thought he had extricated himself from a serious vintage sled addiction (he once owned a Sno-Blazer, so you know he had it bad). I sucked Sandberg back into the world of leaf springs and premix when I started using his home as lodging during the Waconia show. Two years ago I convinced John that a 1977 Arctic Cat Jag would be a great step-up sled for his son, Cal, who was zipping around the yard on a Cat 120 at the time. And so he bought my Jag (which just happened to be for sale). And then he decided that it was really lame for someone who lived just 35 miles away to trailer an old sled to Waconia. So he set out to ride there, with Cal on the tank and his neighbor Mark Glenzinski along on a 79 Jag. This was in 2007. And the WOBLE was born.

Having proven it could be done, Sandberg plotted a bigger WOBLE for 2008, and on Saturday morning ten sleds and 12 riders gathered in the Sandberg yard, ready to point skis northwest to Waconia. Our goal was to arrive in time to participate in the trail ride around the lake, both for fun and to honor our late friend, CJ Ramstad, who was into vintage when vintage wasn’t cool. Riders and sleds included confident WOBLE veterans John and Cal Sandberg and Glenzinski on their Jags, and me on my recently acquired 69 P-19SS Panther. Riding a 1978 Polaris TX 340 was motorsports marketing ace Pat Bourgeois. Pat was a little bleary, explaining that he purchased the TX on Thursday and picked it up the previous evening, and had been wrenching into the night. Jay Lusignan, formerly of the Arctic Cat communications department, arrived ready to ride a natty 1979 el Tigre 5000, wearing the last set of free riding gear he got from Cat. Sandberg’s bicycle-racing buddy Peter Schow and his son Ryan were ready to ride a 1972 Cat Puma, while Bourgeois’s buddy Trevor Stundanski brought a hard-starting 1970 Ski-Doo Olympic 399. Steve Segar, who with Sandberg once operated the outlaw snowmobile circuit known as VRA (Vintage Racing Association) would be riding a borrowed 1978 Yamaha Enticer 250. Sandberg’s brother-in-law, Dean Kasparek, showed up with a 1986 Panther, a sled that’s barely vintage but does have leaf springs and thus is WOBLE-legal. And the group agreed it might be handy for towing duty.

I easily posted points on the WOBLE scorecard by having the oldest sled, with a bonus for my auxiliary fuel tank and my matching vintage suit. I was out-dressed by Schow, who was set to ride his Puma in a 70s-era Polaris suit, wool-lined chopper mitts and a Captain America helmet. But it was Studanski who won the fashion award for his ill-fitting Ski-Doo suit, which looked OK on the top but had legs that barely reached below his knees.

“This was my mother’s suit,” he explained. “I guess it fit her better.”

I reckoned that the sled least likely to finish was the crusty John Deer Trailfire that arrived with a guy named Kelly, a friend of Bourgeois whose last name I never did catch. Like some of the other WOBLE pilots, Kelly is not really active in the vintage sled hobby, but he wanted in on the WOBLE action. There were four or five old sleds parked in the weeds behind the shop where he works. Why the Deere?

“My boss said to take the first one that would start,” he explained.

The Trailfire had no windshield, the hood was coated with dirt, and the seat was secured with a tie-down strap. But it held fuel and was running. Good luck, I thought as I topped off my side tank and yanked the cord on the Panther’s Sachs single.

Leave No Rider Behind
I broke my handlebars about 10 miles into the ride. We were following a route plotted by Trailmaster Sandberg that followed a few marked trails but was mostly ditch-riding, and a short segment through a small, rural cemetery – on the driveway, of course, not over the graves. We stopped in the cemetery to take a break, and I parked with my skis up on a bank, and was pulling the sled back to start it when the handlebar gave way. It was Bourgeois, a man born and raised in the bogs of the wild Minnesota frontier, who calmly assessed the situation and set off looking for repair materials. Kicking in the snow behind a maintenance shed, he found two pieces of iron rod, each about 12 inches long, with a loop on one end like they were used to hold a garden hose. The iron was soft enough to bend by hand to match the curve of the handlebar, and soon Pat has fashioned a splint and produced a roll of duct tape which we started wrapping around the assembly.

I appreciated the help, but I was really dubious that it would render the Panther drivable. I was still in shock, you see. But we got her taped up and I thought that if I tried to only put steering pressure on the left side, I might make it. And off we went.

My penalty for breaking down was being forced to ride with a bouquet of yellow plastic flowers, also found in the weeds behind the cemetery shed, jammed through the loop on the iron rod that stuck out of the tape job. WOBLE rules, of course.

We crossed the Minnesota River on the county highway 45 bridge and I was feeling better about the handlebars. The broken side was surprisingly tight. I decided to channel my inner Dale Cormican and press on. Not long after the river crossing, Schow coasted to a stop with a dead motor. A plug inspection revealed molten alloy on the PTO side, sure sign of a failed crank seal and holed piston on the Kawasaki 340. The Puma was towed to a secure roadside location for pick-up later. Sticking to the WOBLE credo “Leave No Rider Behind,” Peter and his son became passengers, and the group rode on.

We picked up the groomed trail about 10 miles from Waconia, and then stopped at a road crossing to re-fuel Lusignan’s el Tigre, which had consumed a full tank of gas in about 30 miles. We thought he smelled rich. A leaky head gasket was discovered later. After securing my auxiliary fuel tank, I went to start the Panther and noticed that the throttle cable was frozen. Hmmm.

Further investigation revealed that, during the handlebar repair, the cable had been shoved forward and for the last 20 miles had been rubbing on the secondary pulley, which wore through the housing and melted the plastic inner sleeve. When we stopped and everything cooled down, the soft plastic got hard again, and the cable was stuck.

By now I was in the full vintage mindset, and realized I could simply throttle the sled by pulling on the cable housing with my right mitten while I steered with my left. And that’s how I made it the last five miles to Waconia. I was getting pretty good at it by the time we got to the last road crossing, just in time to see the tail-end of the Waconia vintage trail ride go past. The Ski-Doo quit – again – when we stopped at the road, and as he had done at every stop Studanski pulled and pulled furiously to get the 399 running. Only this time the rope broke. Out came the tow strap. At least it was not far to the lake, where we had stashed Sandberg’s truck and four-place trailer for sag duty.

Saved By The Swap
The WOBLE being a round-trip affair, I had hurry to make repairs to my cable, because there was no way I driving back to Prior Lake one-handed. Sandberg gave me an hour. I hiked over to the swap meet made a bee-line to the booth and beaming smile of Don “Dr. Mario” Soukup. Among his Polaris parts was a box of NOS Cat cables, including one that was just right for my Panther, available for the always-friendly Dr. Mario price. I was back in business.

The Ski-Doo was already on the trailer, along with Lusignan’s el Tigre and Glenzinski’s Jag, as those two had to make sure to be home on time for family commitments. They picked up Schow’s Puma on the way back.

That left six sleds still running. The gloomy morning had given way to clear skies and sunshine, and we were ready to WOBLE home, hoping to reach Prior Lake before it got dark. Make that desperate to get back before dark. And it was all going well. Until the Bourgeois Polaris suddenly switched to single-cylinder mode. No spark on the mag side. After determining that the TX 340 would not move on 170cc, Pat left the Polaris in a convenient farm drive and rode two-up on the Deere the rest of the way. I know – nothing runs like a dirty Deere.

And so, of ten who started, five managed to finish the second annual WOBLE. Which implies that there will be a third annual WOBLE. If CJ makes it snow on central Minnesota, watch for us at Waconia..