Unique 'snowbike' project a hit at UAF

March 27, 2019

UAF photo by JR Ancheta. Jordan Osowski, left, and Trevor Norris pose by the snowmachine-motorcycle hybrid they built this winter in the garage of their College Road rental.

Strange thoughts sometimes emerge during a long Alaska winter, a reality that Jordan Osowski and Trevor Norris understand better than most.

Osowski, a UAF business student, and Norris, who graduated with a justice degree last spring, came to a sad realization when the snow began to accumulate last fall. Their favorite hobby, driving motorcycles, was about to take a long hiatus.

After a half-serious brainstorming session, they decided the solution was obvious. Working in the garage of their College Road rental, the roommates spent the next few months fusing a 1979 Honda XL500 motorcycle onto the snowmachine track from a Polaris Timbersled.

“It needed to be given some new life,” Norris said of the broken-down Honda. “We were joking about whether we could put a snowmachine track on it, and then we thought, ‘Maybe we could really do that.’”

The eye-catching concoction has received plenty of attention since they made its first campus commute in late February. Strangers pull over to learn more about the strange sled. A simple stand-alone picture of the bike-sled combo earned more than 150 shares and dozens of comments on UAF’s Facebook page, making it by far the most popular post of the month.

UAF photo by JR Ancheta. Jordan Osowski takes his homemade motorcycle-snowmachine hybrid out for a spin near the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus in March 2019.

The still-unnamed machine owes its existence, in part, to Osowski’s former life as a UAF mechanical engineering student.

Although Polaris makes kits for marrying motorcycles and snowmachines, they’re designed for much newer bikes than the 40-year-old Honda. Osowski manufactured many of the necessary parts with the help of the machine shop at the College of Engineering and Mines, and relied on an assortment of odd purchases from eBay and Amazon to piece those items together. The centerpiece was the XL500, a project bike that had been out of service since it was damaged in a crash last summer.

Osowski figured the various parts totaled about $2,300, combined with a few months’ worth of labor.

“We’ve kind of got this motorcycle addiction,” Norris said. “I guess we just couldn’t do without one in the winter.”

After their snowbike was running, the next challenge was learning how to ride it before the spring snowpack melted away. Both Norris and Osowski are experienced snowmachine drivers, but they had to figure out how to pilot a single-ski sled. After a few weeks of practice — and a top speed of nearly 40 mph — they’re hooked.

UAF photo by JR Ancheta. A light bar is one of many accessories that Jordan Osowski and Trevor Norris found online to assemble the homemade Honda XL500 snowmachine.

“We’ve wrecked it a lot,” Osowski said with a smile. “But this has been far more fun, I’d say.”