Building a trail leveler.

 Making the Leveler

Last season, I discovered I needed a way to pack the trails before setting tracks. This could be accomplished by running the snowmobile around the loops many times, but I wanted a way to do it more quickly.

I built a simple “V” drag to pull behind the snowmobile last season. This worked fairly well but I am always looking to build new things. During the fall I started researching how to build a trail leveler. This proved to be much more difficult than the track setter. I have yet to find any plans for a DIY leveler. I found a few pictures on webpages of people who have built their own using metal and welding pieces together, but none were made out of lumber. There are a couple of companies who sell them, but are really expensive. I do not yet have a welder and find it unlikely my snowmobile could pull a heavy metal drag. Here are some photos of what I have created.

I started by building a frame from 2x4's. This is 33” wide, I came to this width based on how wide my snowmobile is and how narrow our trails are. The length is 4'. I put a couple cross members in to affix the cutters to. These are made out of metal bought from the hardware store. The first two sets of cutters have teeth ground into them. This was done on a bench grinder (very time consuming) and the last set of cutters are smooth edged.

The first couple times using the leveler I discovered it worked too well, cutting deep into the trail bed. This was remedied by adding skegs to the sides that are on an angle. This is so the front cutters are below the leading edge of the skegs and at the rear the skegs extend about an inch below the cutters. The tow ropes are attached to the frame with eye bolts. I had some old dry rotted rope laying around that I made loops out of then tie the good (tow) rope to. This way the old dry rotted rope breaks away when you catch a stump or tree with the drag when taking corners too tight. This design works well for me.

Always trying to one up things, I figured it would be cool to have a combed look to the grooming when done. This is done with a piece of plastic that I cut 1”x1” teeth into. I built a couple risers on the back of the leveler and attached springs to these. The springs are then attached to the plate of teeth, in order to apply down pressure. The plate is attached to the frame of the leveler with two hinges. So far this is working well. I do want to reinforce the plastic by laminating it with a piece of plywood. However the combed look is pretty well lost by the time I run around the trails and set the tracks so it is an addition that most likely could be skipped. I do use this on several of the trails that we do not ski on though, and it is easy to become spoiled snowshoeing on a nice, flat combed trail. This only works on certain snowshoeing trails we have, some are too rugged to get the snowmobile down. And, it is still fun to have to really snowshoe!