From left, Saranac Lake High School students Zackary Goetz and Liam Nobles; SLHS teacher Josh Marlow; and Tri-Lakes Snowmobile Club Vice President Joe Shoemaker, President Nathan Miller and Trail Coordinator Mark Bomyea stand with the trail groomer the students in Marlow’s metals class designed and fabricated this spring. Not pictured are students Will Miemis, Owen Muncil, Gunner Gardner and Carsyn Maroun. (Provided photo — Matt Crumrine)

SARANAC LAKE — Some snowmobile trails in the Tri-Lakes will be kept in shape when the snow starts flying this winter using a groomer a group Saranac Lake High School students designed and fabricated in a shop class this past spring. The students say they plan to put the skills in welding, geometry and mechanics they learned building this big, red machine to use when they graduate from school.

Six students led by Josh Marlow, a technology teacher at SLHS, built the Tri-Lakes Snowmobile Club a tow-behind groomer for them to use on smaller trails the traditional groomers can’t access.

Marlow said when the Tri-Lakes Snowmobile Club approached him with the idea, he jumped on it. He hasn’t collaborated with outside groups like this before, but he’s a snowmobiler himself who has used these trails and knows there’s a need for the connector trails to be in good shape.

He also had a good group of six students, with some advanced ones, in his metals classes at the time who he knew could handle the project.

One of those students was Liam Nobles, a sophomore who took the metals elective class in his freshman year with his good friend Zack Goetz and returned with Goetz to take it again this year because he enjoyed it so much.

“There’s something about the welding and working with metal that stood out to me and made me want to take it again,” Nobles said. “It was just a good environment to be in.”

But this was a challenging project at times. Marlow said they had nothing to reference their designs on. It is an entirely new product.

“We had to, maybe not reinvent the wheel … but we certainly had to modify the wheel,” Marlow said. “We had a lot of days where we just sat back and thought.”

Nobles said it took a lot of “trial and error” until they reached their final design. He had never worked with hydraulics before and said a lot more thinking goes into it because there’s a lot of moving parts. But he said they learned a lot from Marlow.

The students had to design the frames, mechanisms and hydraulics — cylinders, pumps and lines — themselves. Nobles said the groomer needed to raise up high enough to clear rocks when transporting and to lower low enough to groom a trail well with it. This required very precise measurements for the hydraulic cylinders, he said.

Marlow spoke highly of the work Goetz, Nobles, Will Miemis, Owen Muncil, Gunner Gardner and Carsyn Maroun did.

“They had to learn how to weld, and weld well, because this was going to be in a real-world scenario,” Marlow said. “The work the students did was top quality. Very professional.”

The final product exceeded Nobles’ expectations.

“I thought it was cool, but I didn’t think it was going to be as cool as we made it,” Nobles said.

He said it was satisfying to stand back, look at what they designed and built and think, “We made that.”

Nobles is considering going to welding school after graduating high school with the goal of starting his own welding business. But he’s got a couple years still to plan out his future.

After two months of work, they passed off the keys to club President Nathan Miller, Vice President Joe Shoemaker and Trail Coordinator Mark Bomyea.

Marlow said this groomer will be used on the old Delaware and Hudson rail line (Bloomingdale Bog Trail), up the backside of Lake Colby to the Adirondack Rail Trail, down to Moody Tree Farm trail and back to the Bog Trail.