First up is the new Old Iron DVD. This DVD is a newly produced DVD of vintage snowmobiling, covering racing, shows and more. Footage includes old Arctic Cat factory shots, lots of footage from the Waconia show in 2008, 2008 Eagle River Vintage races, including the big World’s Championship. There’s some 1974 SnoPro footage, some on the Polaris thrill team, a brief interview with Edgar Hetteen and much, much more.

It’s color, over 70 minutes long and is great quality footage.

Next up is "I raced Ski-Doo" a photographic look back at Ski-Doo’s racing campaign from 1969 through 1978, and some detailed information on the Snowmobile Hall of Fame in St. Germain Wisconsin. This book contains some very rare, never before scene shots of the factory Ski-Doo racers and sleds.

Featured are Yvon Duhamel, Jerry Jandt, Doug Hayes, Steve Ave, Ed Scubitzke, Jim Bauer, Mike Trapp, Ronnie Durmont, Gaston Ferland, Claude Desrosiers, Chuck Decker, Larry Rugland, Leroy Lindblad, Bobby Donahue and many of the fine Bombardier race mechanics. The best pictures are from 1976 and 1977.

Both"I Raced Ski-Doo … A Different Point of View" and the "Old Iron" DVD are dedicated to our old friend C.J. Ramstad.

Finally, these have been in the store for awhile, but have been a big hit. These are the 2009-2010 VintageSleds.com racing t-shirts, available in tan and green, with VIntageSleds.com on the front, and the Go Fast, Turn Left, Look cool logo on the back. On sale now for just $17.00!

Have a great thanksgiving holiday everyone, and let’s get ready for winter 2009-2010!

When I learned he was going to lose his website, I jumped at the chance to help him out. We got him setup with a new site and he’s gone to town on adding his content from the old website as well as some new content.

He’s already got a lot of stuff up there to read – from info about the site, to decal and detail info, prototype info, readers rides, the early years of Ski-Whiz and more. I’ve been reading it all morning. Great stuff.

I’m glad we can help out; This kind of resource is exactly the kind of thing each and every brand needs.

Thanks Gary!

Visit the New Ski Whiz Rescue Mission today!

The constant growth of the Bull Sessions is a pretty good measurement of how well he’s doing in that volunteer position.

It has not always been easy. But the experience has made Doc a ton of new vintage sled friends around the globe, and I can tell he’s been grateful for everyone of them.

But I get asked all the time about why he’s called "Doc" Jim? Well It’s because he really is a Doctor of Optometry.

Today, the local newspaper printed and posted an article called "A Road To Hope". I highly recommend it. Doc and his work in the world outside of VintageSleds.com make for a pretty amazing story.

Congrats to Doc and nice work! We couldn’t do it without you!

Well today I’m happy to say we’ve done something about that. We are proud to announce a "soft" launch of the new archive section of the website.

The content is pretty thick, there is a ton of pictures, and it goes all the way back to 2000. But unlike the old archives, this one is organized by category, – like racing, cloning, shows, riders sleds, etc. Or you can browse by year. You can also do a quick search for anything and find the article pretty easy.

We continue going through it carefully to make sure links and things are not broken – don’t be surprised if you find more than a couple. We hope to have this all done shortly.

My thanks to Brandon Johnson who had the tough job of stuffing story, after story, after story into the database. He got it done in smokin’ record time!

There’s much more to come as we continually upgrade the website. Thanks again for the continued support and help we get from the whole vintage community!

There’s a permanent link to the new archives on the footer of most pages.

Our 74/75 SnoPro pans, 76 through 80 TX (fiberglass) pans, 76-79 hoods, 79 RXL hoods all come with the blue gel-coat. Just got the new pan (above) and wow did it come out nice! They are the correct weight (or they can be made lighter) for your restoration, rider or racer.

We’ve also listed a full line of Arctic Cat hoods from our friends at Arctic Restoration. I’ve worked with these guys a lot over the past few years and they do really superior work on their parts. Like me, they made all these parts for their own projects and they wanted them right. They come with black gel-coat. Decal them up and you’re ready to go!

Saturday the weather was fantastic for January in Minnesota. Not too cold, and not melting. The Rola Races were a BLAST to watch, and adding in a few of the twin cylinder races for good measure was a welcome addition.

The trail ride was amazing. But me and my group of Polaris fanatics hung back from the main group – which was HUGE – and took a ride later, after the trail had cleared a bit. All that was on the trail was a few stragglers, the unlucky ones who broke down, and a lot of people just watching for fun.

We ran our sleds carefully, not too fast, since none of us bothered to put a helmet on. It just seemed to nice out to be all covered up like that. I have to say, I think that it was the first time I’ve ever ridden a sled without a helmet. What a different experience being able to hear every aspect of the machine running. My thanks to Dale for letting me ride his 77 340 TX and his excellent condition 77 TXL. Lee Resler also let me take his 73 TX out several times. Great fun.

I hung around with friends all late afternoon Saturday, then stayed for about 1/2 of the banquet. I met and talked to so many people that I think I started to lose track of who I was talking to.

One of the BIG highlights for me was the Phil Mickelson Rotax motor collection – wow! Talk about rare motors! Later that night I found out the Clone Blizzard that was being auctioned off for the Make-A-Wish foundation brought in a whopping $4,500!

Sunday morning, I was back bright and early to see the massive array of Ski-Doo sleds on the field. I was NOT disappointed. There was so many I didn’t know where to start. But I took my time and took as many in as I could. One highlight for me was the 76 SnoPro that had and original 76 SnoPro motor in it. Very cool. The lineup of RV’s was pretty amazing, as was the TNT lineup. Very nice sleds all around.

Amongst the non Ski-Doo’s, I took notice of an amazing looking Ski-Whiz up on the hill as well as two stunning 79 Polaris Centurions. Talk about nice. There was a lot of really great sleds up there and a ton of people having a good time seeing old the old stuff

Drag races were the highlight out on the lake on Sunday. Then it was on to the award ceremony. Before they started, I got chance to meet and talk with Girard and randy Karpik, Larry Rugland, John Erlandson and again, many more people I’ve met over the years from the website.

All in all, I greatly enjoyed the weekend, and I thank the Waconia committee that does the show for the incredible hard work they do each and every year to make that show the best it can be, and make so many memories for collectors, enthusiasts, racers and anyone with an interest in old sleds.

Back in the office on Monday I got a pleasant surprise. I took a look at the traffic for the website and what do you know? A new record with 72,383 visitors who looked at a whopping 3.7 million pages in January.

No wonder I had to increase the bandwidth three times! My thanks to everyone who helps out with the site and to those of you who keep checking us out every day – we do appreciate it!

Minnesota Snowmobiler Magazine gave vintagesleds.com a very nice mention in their latest issue. I just wanted to say thanks.

Our Vintagesleds.com "Find of the Year" has some winners for 2008! The Find of the Year is just plain good fun year round, with bribes to the judges being not only allowed, they are encouraged. But seriously, some really remarkable old sleds came out of hiding in 2008 and gave much more proof that good stuff is still out there!

Congratulations to our winners!

First place is Chuck4199 with his Herter’s Falcon

2nd Place was Wigwam1 and his Polaris Lil’ Andy

3rd Place went to Justin Clack and his 650 Arctic Cat

4th went to Sledder Al and his Snow King

5th place also went to Justin Clack, this 78 Ski-Doo Navy Blizzard.

We’ll have judges in place for 2009 very soon.. so don’t forget to share your finds with the world and take a chance on winning a trophy for 2009.

Oh how wrong I was.

Fast forward to 2009 and I’m just a year two years away from my 10th anniversary of vintagesleds.com, and this thing hasn’t stopped growing. December was another record month for new visitors to the site.

Despite the interruption to the Bull Sessions (it was off for a week as we cleaned it up and changed the name to SledTalk 24/7), traffic is up again, and we exceeded our allotted bandwidth this month – twice.

I’m not bragging about any of that. I’m just humbled and sincerely want to say "Thank you".

We’ve been working hard on a newer, faster, better, much more interactive website for some time now. But to implement those features, we had to build a new "foundation" for the website that would allow us to keep adding on. Today the first part of the foundation is completed – with many thanks to Brandon Johnson for all the content moves and testing, and to J.D. Henderickson for solving a very tricky layout issue.

Note to JD: I think all my whining about the footer paid off.

Our first new feature I intend to demonstrate February 14th at "Live on Skis" in International Falls, Minnesota. No details now, but a few SledTalk 24/7 members got a tiny glimpse the other night when I accidentally left a link to it in the menu. Suffice to say the new feature is all about you, less about me.

Finally, all of us here at Vintagesleds.com wish you and yours a happy new year. If the recent perfect winter weather is any indication, 2009 is going to be a great year!

Now with this much snow around – let’s get out there and ride!

*Version numbers are a bad thing. Websites never stop changing so why add an expiration date? I just put the number on here to denote the structure and style of the website are different.

We also now have some lighter weight steering components for you racers – handlebars and steering posts.

For the restoration guys, we now have the Clymer Vintage snowmobile repair manuals, Volumes I an Volume II. The these are an excellent reference for repairing that old sled without having to hunt down the original repair manual. Just $31.95 for either book.

All the proceeds from the store go to pay for bandwidth, server space and to add features to the website.. speaking of which.. we have a new and improved events section coming very soon, and several new features to follow shortly after that.