Northern News Services
Yellowknife (Dec 11/00) - The secret to a good toboggan is in the wood, says Karl Hoffman.
After 35 years of making the classic Northern conveyance for hunters, trappers and mushers, the Fort Smith cabinet maker has settled on red oak from Indiana.
The long, straight grain of the wood is ideal for bending the classic curve that defines the prow of a fine toboggan.
And the oak must be air-dried, said Hoffman, 65, who started working with wood as an apprentice cabinet-maker in his native Germany.
"Kiln-dried won't work," he said.
"This guy just phoned me from MacPherson; the boards keep cracking on him."
Hoffman made his first toboggan not long after he first arrived in the North. He saw toboggan builders in Old Crow bend the boards around a stump in the centre of town.
Since then, hundreds of toboggans have slid from his workshop in Fort Smith. They are in use from Quebec to Yukon and throughout the Northwest Territories.
Hoffman was 21 when he arrived in Canada in 1956. He "didn't know the best part to go, so I picked the centre.I went to Winnipeg."
He found a job in Saskatoon the same day he cleared immigration.
"You could live on a dollar-a-day back then, things were cheap," he recalled. "You could even buy a few beers; it was only ten cents a beer."
Hoffman head about a job in Fort Smith, and together with three friends he headed North in 1957 to build the JBT elementary school.
"We bought an old Pontiac for 750 bucks and came up here," he said.
"It took about 15 hours to get here from Hay River."
Once the school was built, Hoffman worked on the sawmill in Fort Fitzgerald, did some trapping and then moved to Fort Smith where he set up shop.
For most of the year he makes cabinets, but between September and December, he turns to toboggans.
Hoffman has used hickory and other woods for the toboggan but prefers the oak, although it's more expensive than most wood.
"By the time I get it here, it costs me about $6.00 a board foot for it," he said.
He buys the lumber rough in random lengths up to 16 feet long cut to size and planes the boards to a taper in his planer. The boards are boiled in a kettle fashioned from two propane bottles and heated with a wood fire.
"It's a primitive system, but it works," he said. Hoffman also steamed the boards, but decided that the kettle is best at for that "just right" moisture content that allows him to bend the boards in a hand-made jigg.
The curve on a Hoffman toboggan is larger than that found on others. There is a practical reason.
"If you get a big wheel-dog he'll shit right into the sleigh," he laughed.
The toboggans come in 10 foot and 12 foot lengths and 16 or 20 inches wide. They weigh in at about 80 pounds. If ordered complete with backboard and carry-all, they sell for $700 to $1,000 each.
Used with care - not dragged over gravel and stored under cover in summer and given an annual dressing with linseed oil, the toboggans will last eight years or more, he said.
Hoffman doesn't keep track of the overhead and considers himself "lucky if I make about ten bucks an hour" on the toboggans.
"If I figured out the time it takes me to make them, I would probably get discouraged and wouldn't want to make them again," he laughed.
