Okay, so, uh, we’ve been running around these trails on behalf of the Forest County ATV Association with Scott here, and, uh, he’s been running this Arvar magnetic sweeper on our trails—these local trails here in Wabeno, Wisconsin—for what, the whole summer? Basically the whole summer.

Yep.

And, uh, so you guys were the first ones to get this suspension system. Can you tell me something about what difference it made in the performance?

It made a whole lot of difference. It doesn’t bounce like it used to. Also, the nice thing is it doesn’t pull on the truck anymore when you hit a bump, and you could actually feel it, it would pull.

Yeah, ’cause you guys had the solid axle, and this really helps. It actually—you can increase your speed if you want, right? If you’re in a hurry. Usually we like to pull it about 7 miles an hour, 7 to 10.

Yeah, and we were doing about, you know, 10 or so coming back there, and you could see the magnet in the mirror. It’s going up and down. We have it set at, you know, three and a half inches or so, maybe. That’s usually where we run—three and a half, three, three and a quarter.

Yep.

Yeah, and it’s bouncing, but it doesn’t get too close to the ground. So that suspension seems to be about the right pressure for this weight, which is about, you know, 1,100 lb. It looks like we got it, and when that thing hits the ground, you know that’s going to really dig in on the truck.

It does—it did, I should say. With the suspension, it’s nice.

Yeah. So, uh, have you ever had the battery run flat on you?

Uh, the battery has run down low, but not completely gone. You just gotta feather the button sometimes—let it stop, do it again, stop, do it again—so you can get it up. Then you can drive home, and then cycle the battery in there. That is a deep cycle battery.

Yeah, we also have the solar charger we got for a donation. Um, a guy donated it for us. So with that, we don’t have the battery problem so much ’cause somebody used it and then they parked it, didn’t tell anybody, and they didn’t plug it in, they didn’t do anything.

And, um, plus a lot of places we store it, we don’t have power.

Yep.

So, um, the solar charger is awesome. I think we should have that as an option with magnets on it, you know? Stick on here—stick, yeah—like if we had a little, little tail coming out of the battery box and then a magnet, it just sits there, and then we take it up, fold it up, put it in the truck.

Yeah, and that’s what we do.

It’d be a good accessory. I think we just got to find one.

But, yeah, this thing—I mean, you said when you first started pulling out, you said four buckets—

I pulled in—no, four stops. You said it was four stops in about a 10-mile range, and I had to stop four times and empty it because it was full. And I filled a five-gallon pail up in that—four stops.

Yeah, so 10 miles, and then I finished it that day. I think I had like four buckets’ worth of stuff that first day they did, between this whole trail, which is about 30 miles total. Tells you how much is really out there.

Right.

Oh, yeah. Well, just—we got this much again today, just that little bit. It’s not a lot, I mean, it’s cleaner ’cause you’ve been sweeping it this time.

We’ve been sweeping. But, I mean, you said over the winter it kind of gets pushed back up.

Yeah, it’ll get pushed back up—the frost will heave it up and the spikes will reappear.

And so there’s basically just stuff that’s further in the ground that just gets worked up eventually?

Right, so you just keep going, keeps working up, and keeps coming up. And then you get the snowmobile spikes—we get those, that’s a nice big flat base to stick in your tire. It sticks in and it does a lot of that.

And, uh, but we pick up them—a lot of them are aluminum, but they have a little bit of steel on them, usually just enough to catch.

So, uh, how often did you run it? Like once a week or so?

I ran it once a week for the first month and a half, and then we cut back to about every other week or so.

Every other—when we groom the trails. And then I’d go about every other time, then.

Yeah, staying cleaner now that—because we, yeah, we share it with—um, oops, sorry—we share it with the, it’s our group too, but it’s on the west side, so we’ve got a whole other trail system over there that we swap back and forth. And we’ll run it over there, and then they run it, and they’ll have it for a week or two, then bring it back, or I’ll go get it and I’ll run it over on this end again. So this thing’s always going.

So I think Jake said you guys had close to 200 miles on this thing, probably?

That sounds about right.

That’s pretty good for one summer.

Yep.

I mean, especially at 7 miles an hour or whatever.

Right, a long—yeah, it’s a long day.

Yeah, but hey, it’s nice—you can sit in there, can, you know, like you said, take the dog, take coffee, dog, coffee, soda, whatever, relax for a couple hours. Dog likes to jump out, run around while you do the cleanup.

Yeah, so, um, yeah, we like it, we like it a lot. It’s really done a lot, because a lot of these trails are rail trails, right?

These are—yeah, everything that we’re doing are all rail. They were all railroad at one time.

Right, which is where the spikes come from, obviously. So, do you guys have any trails you run that aren’t rail trails? Do they have a similar problem at all?

We don’t run any trails that aren’t grade A rail grade.

Yeah, so you’re not taking this through, like, the—

We don’t take this through a non, um, ’cause we have a lot of—you don’t want to get hung up. Yeah, we got a lot of trails that are not maintained. We don’t take them through there.

Yeah, that’s understandable. I think you need it a lot taller to get through some of the stuff. You don’t want to bury this thing and then have to try to dig it out.

I mean, we’ll take it on a couple of the roads or stuff too, but the county does a lot of that too.

So did you guys ever actually have problems with people getting—You heard people—so people were complaining about it then?

Yep, people were complaining. Um, we actually, now we got the guy from, uh, Sports—Northwood Sports—complaining that he doesn’t have the business he used to have. He used to do a lot of tire repairs.

Well, that’s a good thing for us.

For us, yes. And he’s good with it too.

Yeah, you guys—I’ve seen on your Facebook, the big buckets and nails and railway spikes, it’s like 10 of them, I think you said you collect?

Yeah, I think we’ve got at least 10, maybe 11 or 12. There’s two more over at the other spot we store it.

Couple hundred pounds of steel.

Oh, there’s more than that—each bucket’s probably a couple hundred pounds.

That’s insane, I guess. Yeah, I mean, if I owned an ATV out here and just bought a brand new set of mud tires, I think I’d be pretty happy that you guys are doing that, ’cause those aren’t cheap to replace. You know, every nail, that’s—could be, and especially if you put a railroad spike in it or something.

Yeah, you can’t plug that. I mean, every one of these could be a, you know, $250 tire.

Oh, yeah. If you’ve got a big set of, like, 30s or something, that’s 200 bucks. I seen one of those pushed right into a tire, and I seen one pushed right into a truck tire on a road.

Yep, that’s—you can’t really patch that, not safely, anyways.

No. Yeah, especially on a quad tire, you get that in between the treads, they’re pretty thin compared to trucks, too. I don’t care if it’s 8-ply or 10-ply, you get it right—still sharp. It might be 100 years old, but it’s still pretty sharp.

So, yeah, I mean, I’d be happy that you guys are doing that. And this thing seems to work with the new suspension, so this is now officially an off-road magnetic sweeper, without the quotations.

There you go.

Because you can bounce on it.

Yep, yep. No, it makes a big difference.

All right, I’m pulling it. Well, we’ll get you a new skid, because these guys like to use this thing as a grader.

A little bit, little bit. So get you guys a new skid bar.

Thanks for having us out, Scott, appreciate it.

No problem.

And I guess we’ll see you guys on Saturday.

Saturday, yes.

Whenever, we’ll show you more of our rubble then.

Yeah, it’ll all be there.

Yeah, we’ll see the full collection, take a picture.