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Al is a retired papermill worker from Necedah, Wis., who saw this giant 13½-foot Cat crumbling under a disintegrating sheet of blue plastic out behind Leisure Time Sports. It was sitting on a trailer and had been there for roughly 20 years.
Al had seen it plenty of times, but Terry Boettcher, Leisure Time's owner, kept turning down Al's offers to buy the old custom-built limo Cat. Terry and his co-workers had built the sled themselves.
"It was a quiet winter with a lack of snow. We got bored," he says now. So they took a couple older trade-ins, about 1969 Panthers, and used the parts to build the limo, also having a one-piece tunnel special built for the snowmobile.
"We just did it for fun," Terry says, but he notes that when you put five or six people on the sled and ran it by the dealership it got people's attention.
"It takes a hay field to turn it around," Terry adds.
But after a few years the excitement ran out and the Cat dealership wasn't large enough to keep the sled in the showroom. So out back it went.
Finally in 2000 Terry relented and Al headed home with a "basket case" for about $400.
The base sled, both Al and Terry believe, has an early 1970s Panther front end, but with a horsier 395cc JLO single-cylinder engine that is capable of 24 horsepower.
The motor still runs fine, and Al will start it up for you if you visit the Memory Lane vintage sled display at Hay Days each fall. He has been bringing it there for several years.
But when Al bought it, the Cat was in rough shape. "I took all 100 or so rivets out of the sled and cleaned them all up, along with all of the sled's aluminum," he says. That required some fine steel wool, SOS pads and a lot of elbow grease. Then he put the sled back together, repainted it a Cat black and attached a new set of Arctic Cat stickers.
The engine only needed a little work. The bearings had gone bad, but the pistons were like new, he says. The sled had only been run a few times prior to the dealership abandoning it.
Under the long one-piece tunnel are two early 1970s Cat slide-rail suspensions. And Al says if he disconnects the plastic Fast Tracks, which is made up of sections connected by pins, the track will extend about 25 feet.
His biggest challenge was restoring the long 7 ½-foot seat on this rare custom Cat. The big seat was recreated by a firm in Hustler, Wis., matching the original leopard-skin print of the seat cushion at $100 a yard. Al says the sled uses three regular seat cushions glued onto a board.
All told the cover cost $160 and other parts pushed his renovation costs to about $900, he says, not including his time and labor.
Yet in this case it was a labor of love and took about three months of evenings and weekends. Al doesn't drive it much, wanting to preserve the track as well as he can. So he just fires it up to pull on and off his trailer. Besides, he says, it requires quite a bit of room to turn.
Estimated value now?
Al guesses $2,500, maybe more. But he's not selling his long limo Cat any time soon.