The Sno-Prince and its Royal Pretender Siblings

Furniture manufacturer Lionel Baril founded Lionel Enterprises Inc. in 1966 so that he could enter the booming snowmobile business. After learning metal fabrication from the Baril family’s Princecraft boat company of Prince-ville, Quebec, he then built a snow bike called a Ski-Jet that is not to be confused with the supremely ugly conventional sled of the same name from Corrugated Metal Container Corp. (CMC) in Pennsylvania that was available at roughly the same time.

Very few dealers signed on to sell Baril’s Ski-Jet, so for 1967 he began building a Ski-Doo clone constructed with parts acquired from Sno*Jet in nearby Thetford Mines, Quebec, and crowned the resulting machine with the regal name of Sno-Prince.

This initial limited-build Sno-Prince was powered by a 15 horsepower Hirth 300 single and featured a two-tone color scheme of light cream over chocolate brown. A small number of these sleds were also built as the Voyager snowmobile for the Hudson’s Bay Company of Toronto to market in the Canadian north, but that brand was discontinued after just one unsuccessful season.

Baril’s Ski-Jet was also discontinued for 1968, but his more successful Sno-Prince returned with more power choices. A new private-label brand variant was also built, the all-red Sno-Commander for the Moto-Mower Company of Ingersol, Ontario. Marketed through the 1970 season, the Sno-Commander didn’t changed much during its short life except for added power options.

Regal Pretenders Proliferate

With growing market acceptance, the very similar 1969 Sno-Prince line was expanded by adding Sachs 277 and Lloyd 386 engine choices models to the existing Hirth-powered variants.

Snow Goer tested a 1969 Sno-Prince A-28 with the Lloyd engine and rated it “good” in most categories. It did get an “excellent” for limited engine vibration, probably because the Lloyd twin was a big improvement over the single-cylinder ’68 Sno-Prince that editors tested for the prior year. The ’69 test machine also got a “very good” rating for handling/steering and noise, but only earning “fair” grades for traction on flat surfaces and on hills.

However, it was still a copy of an old Ski-Doo that was loaded with borderline obsolescent features. Worse, the under-performing Lloyd 386 engine had earned a reputation as a total pig in AMF sleds, damaging acceptance for the powerplant in other brands’ sleds.

Baril continued building Sno-Prince sleds and re-badged variants for others to sell. His biggest customer was Quality Axle Manufacturing of Lansing, Michigan. They sold Sno-Prince derivatives as Ski-King, Sno-King and Trail King snowmobiles from 1969 to 1971, using at least five different importer and distributor identities from three different physical locations in the Lansing area.

These “royal” machines never evolved much from the 1969 Sno-Prince template. With mostly the same power choices under a couple of different hoods of various colors, they had some bumper changes, retrograde substitution of a drum brake for the disc brake, variations of gas tank sizes and storage locations, and often the addition of a tow hitch.

A few free-air powered racing models, some supposedly with the Hirth Honker 793 triple and slide rail suspensions, were also constructed, but there is no record of them ever accomplishing anything at all in competition. However, Quality Axle did establish serious distribution from New England to the Rocky Mountains, with a 200 per-state minimum sometimes required to become a distributor. And they backed the sleds with advertising in leading snowmobile magazines, so they did move some of this increasingly obsolete iron.

In return, Lionel Enterprises became the Quebec distributor of the Quality Axle snowmobile wheel kit for Sno-Prince sleds. This two-axle, four-wheel kit was tested on a Sno-King for the Spring 1969 issue of Snow Goer.

“Converting your snowmobile requires a nominal outlay of money, approximately one afternoon of time, and gives you an additional seven months of use of your snowmobile,” reported our editors at the time. Promoted heavily by Quality Axle, the $308 kit did not sell very well, as wheel kits for sleds never really caught on with the snowmobiling public.

Montgomery Ward also bought Sachs-powered Sno-Prince variants from Lionel, marketing them as the 1970 Snowmobile 370. They sold poorly despite heavy local newspaper advertising for the Ward’s locations that carried them. Another private label version of the 1970 Sno-Prince was the very rare Sparton, built for Sparton Marine, and not to be confused with the Bonham Spartan iron dog. It was also similar to the rebadged models for Quality Axle.

Deposed & Departed

Meanwhile, Giffen Recreational Inc. of Miami, Florida, had acquired Lionel Enterprises in 1970. Sno-Prince was overhauled for 1971 with new model names, new styling with an attractive gold over dark blue color scheme, JLO engines as another power choice and 15-inch tracks on some models. Most of the private-label brands were discontinued, but surplus parts including Lloyd engines were used to build some 1972 Sno-Job XL 386 snowmobiles. GJC Liquidators blew out Sno-Jobs as low as $528 in the Escanaba area of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Giffen Recreational went bankrupt during the 1971 season, resulting in Sno Prince snowmobile and Princecraft boat assets being sold to International Alloy, Inc. That American company showed some really interesting and different 1973 Sno-Prince prototypes with a major emphasis on safety, but then left the business before any of those machines were produced for sale.

Equipment and considerable remaining inventory of 1971 and ’72 sleds were liquidated by a trio of companies in Quebec, Ohio and upstate New York. And, in the end, this princely machine and its regal variants were never anything more than royal pretenders.

SPECS

Manufacturer: Lionel Enterprises, Inc., Princeville, Quebec, Canada

POWERTRAIN

Engine: 386cc Lloyd LS400/18 piston-port radial-fan twin with one Tillotson HR-26A diaphragm pumper carb, Bosch magneto & breaker point ignition, and single pipe into muffler

Lubrication: Pre-mix at 40:1

Claimed power output: 19 HP @ 4,200 RPM (actual power output was considerably less)

Clutches: St. Lawrence 1000-series standard duty drive and driven

CHASSIS

Type: Welded and electrostatically-painted 14-gauge steel chassis with stirrups, chromed tube steel bumpers, and removable fiberglass hood

Claimed dry weight: 280 pounds

Front suspension: Triple leaf springs

Ski stance: 23.5-inches

Rear suspension: Bogie wheels (12 on 3 trucks) with grease fittings and torsion springs

Track: 15.75-inch wide 3-ply molded rubber with steel reinforcement rods and dual rubber-coated aluminum sprocket drive

Brake: Caliper disc on driven pulley

Fuel capacity: 3.75 gallons

Standard equipment: Choke, stick fuel gauge, 2-tone enamel paint, 2-tone vinyl upholstery with padded seat back, double front bumper, rear seat storage compartment, snow flap

MSRP: $895