Skistuvegen 14 · 2420 Trysil · nine people

A shed, a jig and fourteen weeks

Two machines a month, twenty-two a year, and never more than six on the floor at once. We have turned work away four times rather than take a seventh.

Bay 1 · framesBay 2 · tracksBay 3 · driveBay 4 · cab + paintStoreCommissioningOfficeCharge bayOut to the trail, 300 mPlan NS-SH-01 · 1 240 m² · built 1974 as a sawmill

The shed was a sawmill until 1998. The crane rail down bay 1 is the original one and still lifts a frame.

Pass one · uphill · fourteen weeks

What happens in which week

The calendar below is the real one. Week 6 is the photograph you get by email: the frame welded, squared and stamped, before anything covers it up.

135791113Frame and floorS355 box, jigged, squared to 1.5 mmTracks and bogiesBelts cut, grousers bolted, tension setDrive and packGenset, inverter, six modules, loomCab, glass, paintSix faces, heated, two coatsCommissioningTwo nights on the roundWeek 6 · the frame photograph · 50 % falls due

A slot slips about one week in five, almost always because a battery module is late out of Gothenburg. We tell you the day we know, not the week before handover.

Pass two · downhill · who signs what

Four of the nine, and the line each of them signs

An older woman in a patterned knitted sweater standing by a window — Sigrid Haukeland
Works manager · founded the shed in 2009 · 62
Signs the handover sheet. Nothing leaves Trysil until she has driven it one full round herself, and she has sent two machines back to bay 4 after doing so.

An older man with a white beard, glasses and a flat cap — Per Johan Sletten
Blade and tiller · thirty-one winters on trail machines · 61
Signs the seam. He sets every tiller by hand on the test strip behind the shed and will not release one that leaves a pitch outside 17 to 19 mm.

A man in a workwear jacket standing outdoors on a railway line — Tobias Rygg
Drivetrain and controls · came from marine hybrids · 34
Signs the drive. He wrote the turn logic that lets the machine counter-rotate in a two-metre lay-by, and he will argue about it for as long as you like.

A young woman holding a power drill in a tool-lined workshop — Amina Bakke
Battery and electrical · apprenticed here in 2021 · 26
Signs the pack. Every module is cycled twice and logged before it goes under the floor, and the log goes in the folder that travels with the machine.

A large industrial shearing machine standing under a steel roof — The 1974 shear in bay 1, bought with the sawmill. It cuts every floor plate we use, 6 mm at a pass.

Pass three · uphill · the way we work

Nothing is subcontracted that touches the snow

The frame, the blade, the tiller, the setter and the track units are cut, welded and set here. The genset, the inverter, the glass and the seats are bought in, and we publish who from if you ask.

That line is not ideology. It is because every warranty argument we have ever had was about something somebody else made, and because Per Johan cannot shim a tiller he did not build.

Machines built since 2009: 241
Still working today: 236
Average age of the fleet: 6.4 years
Longest unbroken customer: since 2011

Pass four · the last one · two nights before it leaves

Every machine is driven round Fageråsen twice before anybody pays the last thirty per cent

Night one is loaded and slow: 27 km, every turn, blade and tiller working, with Sigrid in the right-hand seat and a clipboard. Night two is on the winch up the 38° pitch and back down with the setter in. If anything on either night is wrong, the machine goes back inside and your slot moves, and you are told that evening.

54.8 km

driven before handover

2 nights

on the customer's own trail afterwards

7

machines sent back inside since 2009

Come and watch one being built