Ski-Doo's REV platform - revolutionary

Ski-Doo's REV platform changing the way snowmachines are built

By CRAIG MEDRED
Anchorage Daily News

Published: March 27th, 2005
Last Modified: March 27th, 2005 at 05:25 AM

AINY PASS -- Although long a denizen of Minnesota's north woods -- snowmobile capital of America -- Mark Nordman never developed much fondness for the motorized beast.

Snowmachines were great for covering ground fast or for packing in sled dog trails, but Nordman, like many, found the machines beat up his body. The ride on a dog sled was far more enjoyable.

Then, he threw a leg across the seat of a Ski-Doo REV for the first time.

"Now I know why people like snowmobiling,'' said Nordman, marshal of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.

Snowmachine racer Ken Lee came at the REV design, or more properly a variant of it, from a different direction. He's been a snowmobile addict forever, riding them for entertainment and racing. A former winner of the 2,000-mile Iron Dog snowmachine race from Big Lake to Nome and back, he found the new-age, REV-style design with its long-travel, A-arm front end and upright riding position more like a motocross bike than any snowmobile he'd ridden.

He was impressed by how that enabled the machine to eat up bumps without eating up the driver. He sees the design, pioneered by Ski-Doo, as the future for snowmobiles.

He's not alone.

Â• SnoWest magazine labeled the REV platform, now used in almost all models of Ski-Doos, as the first significant change in snowmobile design since 1980, proclaiming "a revolution to the evolution."

Â• "Discard your sit-down sled and head for the REV,'' suggested American Snowmobiler.

Â• "Future machines will be influenced by it,'' said SnoGoer magazine. "The REV takes conventional 'in-the-box' thinking and tosses it out the window."

What's all this fuss about, you ask?

Come along for a ride.

SKI-DOO'S EASY RIDER

Out in the flat light of the frozen and snow-covered swamps north of Skwentna, the ground and the sky meet as one in a landscape with little definition.

In the absence of shadows, bumps and ruts disappear. Any trail is detectable only by the black smudge of exhaust where someone has idled a stopped snowmachine earlier in the winter or by the rare tuft of brown grass exposed by the March sun.

Under normal circumstances, riding would be miserably rough, as indeed it is for a colleague pounding along behind on my old Polaris Indy. Once, that machine was the state of the art, and I still love it the way you develop an attachment to a comfortable old pair of shoes.

But at the moment, I'm gliding along on a Ski-Doo Summit built on the REV Platform, and it is simply eating up the terrain. Not only that, I can comfortably ride standing up, which offers a slightly better view.

On my old Polaris, trying to stand at the handlebars for any time would leave my back aching. On the Ski-Doo, it's so comfortable that over the course of the next several days -- as we make our way high into the Alaska Range and then rocket back out -- I find myself regularly riding this way as I scan for hard-to-find trail.

Lee's comparison to a motocross bike will cross my mind more than once, although I can't help but think that the seating position -- if you can call it that -- seems more like what you find on a personal watercraft.

On rough trail (the winter version of waves?) it is pleasant to ride in this upright position, instead of pounding up and down, bouncing off the seat of what has become the standard snowmobile, with trailing-arm front suspension and slide-rail rear suspension.

The first slide-rail rear suspensions appeared at the end of the 1960s. By the 1970s, they rendered bogey wheels extinct and made snowmobiles rideable on rough trail. Over the next 30 years, slide-rail suspensions grew better and more reliable.

The REV retained a proven, long-travel, slide-rail rear suspension, but coupled it to an A-arm front suspension like that seen in open-cockpit race cars. The rider moves to the pivot point atop the sled.

Rather than go into a technical discussion of this, here's what you need to know:

At the end of a day of hard riding, this suspension setup left me feeling ready for more.

And at the end of several days of hard riding, this suspension left me feeling no worse than on the first day.

Where normally there would be soreness in the back, shoulders and legs, there was almost none.

The new shape of snowmobiling makes riding not only exhilarating, which it has always been, but pleasant, which it hasn't always been.

IMPRESSIVE PERFORMANCE

If memory serves, I saw the first Ski-Doo built on the REV platform at the Great Alaskan Sportsman Show in Anchorage two years ago.

I was unimpressed. I grew up on snowmobiles in Minnesota and raced them a bit as a kid. I understood the key design thinking from its heyday of the early 1970s:

Keep the center of mass -- the rider -- low.

This was simple physics. Low, flat objects are hardest to tip over.

I remembered steel-cleated tracks too and sliding snowmobiles down icy roads with those tracks acting like the blades of so many ice skates. When you got sliding like this, you really had to keep low. If you didn't, the first time the cleats hit a patch of gravel or anything else to slow them down you and the machine would roll like a tumbleweed in a hurricane.

Given this design prejudice, the new REV platform looked all wrong. The driver sat high. The engine was too far forward. And then there was that strangely short cowling.

How, I wondered, would one open that cowling to get at the engine, drive belt, brake and chain case for regular maintenance?

These concerns were not eased by the discovery that the cowling opened in pieces. The sides swung out. A small hood in the front opened up.

Nothing was "normal."

It seemed so wrong. A snowmobile was supposed to have a cowling that simply folded forward, revealing a huge open area with plenty of room to wrench on everything.

The oddities of REV's design kept me away for a couple years. Personally, I don't consider myself all that much of a Luddite, but maybe I am.

But there was no ignoring the rave reviews coming from almost everyone who slung a leg over the seat of one of these machines. Friends, snowmachine acquaintances, snowmobile magazines and Web sites all said the REV platform rode so well you had to try it to believe it.

That was what finally forced me to hop aboard a demo for five days in the Alaska Range during the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in March.

Aside from discovering the pleasant riding position of the REV, the most revealing part of spending time with the machine was the discovery of how much thought had gone into the design. Little things impressed:

Â• An under-cowling toolbox big enough to actually hold a functional number of tools;

Â• A screw-in clutch expander to make changing belts a breeze;

Â• A spare gas can and storage system built into the back of the seat;

Â• An easily accessible oil tank with a large enough knob to make easy the task of adding oil for the two-cycle engine;

Â• A set of handlebars narrow enough to make it possible to hike well out over the side of the machine while side-hilling and still maintain use of the throttle. This might seem like a small thing, but I've ridden a lot of sleds that have a throttle hard to reach when you're hanging over one side of the machine to hold a side-hill.

Â• And most of all, unexpected stability.

Despite everything I'd read about Ski-Doo moving the engine as far forward and as low as possible in designing the REV platform, I still expected the upright position of the rider to make the sled tippier, and to some extent it did.

Dudley Benesch at Alaska Mining & Diving Supply offered to change the ski stance on the Summit I was riding to a wider, more stable spread to overcome this. But I said no, preferring the narrower skis that make it easier to maneuver the sled by throwing your weight around.

This worked well on much of the narrow Iditarod Trail, but not when I tried to straddle a 3-foot-deep rut caused by the drag brakes of 70 some dog sleds traveling north. The rut was just barely narrower than the width of the skis on the snowmobile. Keeping a ski on either side proved impossible.

So I can assure you that if you drop one ski 3 feet below the other in a rut, you can roll a REV. I did, and in the process discovered the nifty, breakaway windshield Ski-Doo designed into the machine.

The wind screen did end up suffering a crack in a high-speed encounter with a sizeable limb, but then it also saved me from getting bashed by the same branch.

From the bottom of the Happy River Gorge up into the Alaska Range, we fought, chopped and shoveled our way -- along with would-be buffalo hunters Mark Equevilley and Joe Susewind of Chugiak -- to Rainy Pass. Ken Lee had led the latter duo to believe they could easily ride over the pass to hunt buffalo in the Farewell Burn.

That "ride'' turned out to be more of an adventure over a trail punched full of sled-trapping holes.

The miserable trail might have been best summed up by a colleague who repeatedly said, as we chopped down the sides of ruts to make a surface on which the machines could at least move forward:

"We'll never get back. We'll never get back.''

Of course, we did, and the REV performed admirably.

A RADICAL NEW DESIGN

Back in Anchorage, I started to research the REV platform.

The idea emerged from the Ski-Doo Advanced Concepts Team, formed in 1995 to design Sea-Doo watercraft.

Two members of that team -- technician Berthold Fecteau and engineer Bruno Girouad -- started playing with a radically new design as early as 1996, according to Snowtech Magazine.

"Their concept of starting with the driver in what they considered to be the right place ... was pretty much the opposite of how it had always been done,'' Snowtech reported.

They wanted to get the rider's weight over his feet, taking the rider from the sitting position of an easy chair to something closer to the position of someone in a kneeling chair.

"The hip joint,'' Snowtech noted, "had always been positioned parallel to or slightly below the knee joint. This is very significant; in this position, in order to lift yourself up off the seat (for bumps) the rider is forced to use their arms and upper body to bench press their entire body weight every single time they wanted to lift their butt or stand up. Over the course of a 100-mile ride, this position became very tiring.

"The solution? Move the rider forward, way forward, and position the hips so they're higher than the knees, like a motorcycle.''

Three years later, after a bunch of prototypes, the first snowmachines built around this idea appeared. Not until January 2002 were the first REV-based Ski-Doo unveiled for the media.

Now they're taking over.

Since the REV platform was introduced, Ski-Doo has grabbed the No. 1 position in snowmobile sales and is now nearing 40 percent of market share. The Ski-Doo line up for 2006 contains only four utility sleds still built around old-style frames.

Everything else -- including the new Tundra -- is on a version of the REV platform. The lightweight, low-horsepower Tundra has long been a north country favorite. When threatened with extinction some years back, a group of Alaska and Canadian dealers teamed up to guarantee its survival by contractually agreeing to buy a set number every year.

If those dealers liked the old Tundra, they could be euphoric about the new one.

Weighing just 375 pounds and sporting a 136-inch-long, 15-inch-wide track, this Tundra should be able to float over just about everything and offer a cushy ride to boot. For those who don't want to go fast -- the single-cylinder, 270cc, fan-cooled two-cycle engine doesn't have much horsepower -- this could prove the ultimate Bush-cruising sled.

Meanwhile, other snowmobile manufacturers are mimicking the REV platform.

Polaris has its new Fusion sleds.

The Fusion has the short cowling, the A-arm front suspension and the low-mount engine pioneered in the REV platform. Look for this to be the shape of all snowmobiles to come.

And after a week of bashing around on some truly marginal trail in the Alaska Range, it's easy to see why.

The ride has not only gotten better; it's gotten a lot easier on the body. And for America's aging, baby boomer population -- the people with the money to spend on snowmachines -- what could be better?

Longest post I have ever seen LOL.

We're getting a snowmobile this fall and I was leaning towards a Yamaha but I'll have to reconcider.

if i were to buy a new sled it would have to be the new polaris iq....although to buy a new one you need a racing resume u can still get them off ebay......ugly but the best...

the rev600 is an amazing sled

redlandracer117 wrote:

if i were to buy a new sled it would have to be the new polaris iq....although to buy a new one you need a racing resume u can still get them off ebay......ugly but the best...

you have to race in order to be able to buy a brand new sled?!?!?!?!