Antarctic Snow Cruiser

Tucker Sno-Cat is still in business too, still making snow crawlers. There's something to be said about businesses that don't try to diversify, they just keep making one line of good product.

They were designed for swamps, where apparently this tyre design works well. On snow, treadless tyres are essentially useless, and this was a large part of why the cruiser failed to achieve much of anything.

I suspect that at the time producing and transporting suitable tyres was extremely difficult, so they weren't able to try swapping the original tyres for something more suited to the conditions.

Possibly, the LCC-1 that the US Army used in greenland was successful and while the tyres had treads, they were very shallow treads.

A picture here:

https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2901/14573121102_56c93ec47f_b....

probably all that was available in that size plus a lack of understanding. or maybe they thought chains would be fine. but in the pictures there are just four chains! need another 20 or so i would think.

The threads will be packed with snow in no time.

I would assume the tyres were chosen to work well on the terrain of Agartha, the ultimate destination of the expedition.

I tended to imagine that was inspired by larger 'pushback' vehicles at airports.

eg. https://www.terbergdts.co.uk/globalassets/special-vehicles-s... - looks bad-ass!

Thanks, that video is way more informative that the wikipedia article.

We forget, with the advent of digital photography, how pivotal access to a darkroom used to be for all sorts of endeavours.

Facility for developing Black and White photos is not very complicated. Usually you just need an enlarger, some chemical tanks and a room with no light. If you want to do slides (rather than prints), and use the right film, it's even simpler as you just need to develop the film.

> By the way, recognize those tires? Bob Chandler bought four of them from a Seattle junkyard and fitted them to Bigfoot 4 to capture the title of Tallest Monster Truck.

From what I have read elsewhere this was where the monster truck idea started.

Not for me, subscription only site.

Horsepower (which has many definitions) is the torque output multiplied by the engine RPM (divided by some number to make it equal to the strength of an average horse). Since these engines operate in a relatively low RPM range, the HP number is not that high. Most countries switched to using kilowatts as a measure of vehicle engine power.

Also remember that these are diesel engines from the late 1930's. This was before the development of 2-stroke (blown) or even turbocharged diesel engines. These engines were a lot less powerful compared to modern diesel engines.

The engine actually only made 150hp, but luckily there were 2 of them.

Yes, they were certainly less efficient than modern engines. However, ICE engines have always had trade-offs between power output per size, mechanical efficiency and reliability, and for this vehicle the last one was certainly of most importance.

Horsepower are only one of the measurements for an engine. These engines have enormous amount of torque which is more important than sheer horsepower.

Diesels like this trend to produce relatively low horsepower, but lots of torque.

As a comparison, here's a modern 11L diesel:

https://www.macktrucks.com/powertrain-and-suspensions/engine...

You'll notice that HP is 325-425, so not that dramatically different from the Snow Cruiser.

They lacked turbo charging which is necessary for diesel to make modern levels of power due to the low max rpm of the engines.

Naturally aspirated diesel where relatively efficient they simply lack power.

Diesel-electric drivetrains were planned earlier for some heavy tank designs - e.g. TOG2 and I think one of the Porsche designs.

From Wikipedia:

> Wheels and tires retracted into housings where they were heated by engine exhaust gases. This was to prevent low-temperature cracking of the natural rubber compound. Long front and rear overhangs on the body were to assist with crossing crevasses up to 15 feet (4.6 m) wide. The front wheels were to be retracted so the front could be pushed across the crevasse. The front wheels were then to be extended (and the rear wheels retracted) to pull the vehicle the rest of the way across. This process required a complicated, 20-step procedure.

More research seems to indicate that continuous tracks do have significant maintenance drawbacks compared to tires (a tire can be expected to last significantly more miles than a track between repairs/replacement).

However, it definitely was a design defect as the cruiser was unable to travel reliably on the snow, and Byrd had previous success in Antarctica with tracked vehicles...