Nathan Lee

Motorcycles and snow don’t really mix. I’ve ridden in snow a few times, and believe me it’s about as difficult a substance you’ll ever encounter on a bike.

A few times in my travels I got some surprise snowfall (one of the problems of touring Europe towards the end of the year).

It’s one of those bits of adversity which really make the journey memorable (so long as you don’t get hurt too badly of course). If you get stuck in snow there’s really not much you can do except wait it out, failing that slowing down (first gear isn’t low enough!), never using the front brakes, holding on tight and struggle through it.

But there are options (if you have the option to prepare properly)!

The following creative types deserve points for coming up with something functional that lets them take a bike at reasonable (or in some cases-crazy) speeds.

Sports bikes on ice

Insane is about all I can say for these guys, I pity the poor sod who had to painstakingly put the bolts/spikes etc through the tyres, but the results speak for themselves.

Here’s one by a guy named Sjaak Lucassen, a crazy “ride everywhere in the world on an R1″ guy (I’m not kidding when I say “everywhere”). He took a bunch of tek screws to a motorcycle tyre. Also interesting is his technique for changing a sportsbike wheel via leaning against something without a centre stand.

Anyhow, it’s a pretty standard practice for the strange class of nutcases who race motorcycles on ice. See Dieseljo.com’s guide to ice racing.

This looks like it seems to work ok too:

Moving on to options that can work with normal tyres: From ADVRider‘s forum there’s these beasties:

Allgo’s custom motorcycle snow chains. He was talking of making a bunch of them (check the thread) but the parts he made them from seemed to be a bit scarce.

Here’s the creator fitting them on a pretty snowy trail.

If you want something you can buy (albeit quite expensively), then perhaps these are the go: MV snow claws.

Perhaps a bit better suited to road tyres for motorcycles.

So a tank and a motorcycle have a roll in the hay..

And to end on something completely different: if you aren’t particularly attached to having wheels on your motorcycle, the boffins at AD Boivin have come up with this type of creation:

The Explorer Smart All Terrain Systemwhich allows you to turn your motorcross bike into a snow bike.

A video of it in action here:

Looks like fun.

And for the pedal version there’s the Ktrak Snow cycle:

Update: Just came across this very old school idea: