The Kick Sled and What to Buy

This module reconstructs North House Folk School’s Kick Sled Building: Push and Glide with Randy Schnobrich, a Grand Marais woodworker who moved to the North Shore from Wisconsin in 1994 and has mushed dogs and taught at North House for over 20 years ¹. Students build a kick sled of birch, from laminating wood for the runners to shaping a customized handlebar for steering, with hand and power tools. The finished sled is 72 inches long, 16 wide, and 36 high, and it collapses for transport ². The class runs a Friday evening and two full days, with a $290 materials fee ³. The plans aren’t published; the design in this module is worked out from those dimensions and the sources cited.

How it works

A kick sled, spark or sparkstötting, is a chair on two long runners, joined at the front by a bar, with a handlebar across the top of the chair back. The runners continue behind the chair about twice as far as the chair is long. You stand on one runner and kick with the other foot, which is where the name comes from ^{4 5}. A passenger or a load rides on the seat ⁵; an old photograph by Anna Hedström shows a man pushing a woman seated on one ⁶.

It needs ice or hard-packed snow; it won’t run on sanded or salted roads. On those surfaces 15 to 20 km/h comes easily ⁴, and it’s good for getting out to ice fishing ⁴.

From drög to Orsa

The kick sled grew from the drög, a short, wide load sled with uprights that the driver stood behind on one runner ⁴. It’s generally said to have been invented in upper Norrland in the later 1800s, though Stockholm reports go back to the late 1700s ⁴; the first definite record is a northern Swedish newspaper around 1870 ⁵. Kick sled racing was a popular sport from 1890 to 1910 and an event in the Nordic Games ⁵.

Early sleds had stiff wooden runners and were heavy ⁵. Their runners were iron-shod or boiled in tar to glide in hard cold, and wooden runners could split in sharp turns ⁴. Thonet, the bentwood furniture maker, sold kick sledges in its 1904 catalogue: two long thin runners, a post and handlebar in the middle, a bench-like seat in front, and foot plates on the runners behind; riders strapped crampons to their shoes ⁷. A Swedish army trial model from 1914, with wooden runners, is 220 cm long and 104 cm high ⁸.

In 1909 the Orsa factory brought out the Orsaspark, with patented spring-steel runners ⁴, and flexible metal runners quickly became standard in Sweden, Finland, and Norway ⁵.

How big

• North House’s sled: 72 by 16 by 36 inches ².
• A typical adult sled: runners about 2 m long and 400 mm apart, handlebars about 900 mm (35 in) high ⁵.
• A Finnish sport sled: steel runners 1,500 mm long; handlebar adjustable 73 to 95 cm for riders 130 to 200 cm tall; folds to 150 by 40 by 25 cm ⁹.

What to buy

• Birch for runners and chair. Yellow birch is one of the good bending woods ¹⁰; ash, red oak, and white oak also bend well ¹¹.
• MDF for the bending form, ripped into strips at the store to save dust ¹¹.
• Epoxy for the runner laminations: structural, water-resistant for limited outdoor use, gap-filling, and it needs only light clamping pressure; it’s used for laminating boat hulls and sports equipment ¹². Ordinary yellow glue is rated for interior use ¹².
• UHMW plastic for the runner bottoms: a very low-friction, abrasion-resistant plastic that hardly absorbs water. It doesn’t bond well, so it gets screwed on ¹³.
• Bolts and wing nuts, so the chair comes off the runners and the sled packs flat, as North House’s does ².

Try it

Before buying wood, stand behind a kitchen chair with your hands on its back, one foot lifted as if kicking. Have someone measure from the floor to your palms. That’s your handlebar height; check it against the 36 inches of the class sled and the 73-95 cm range of a sport sled ⁹.