Michael LaBree's Arctic Cat 440 Snowmobile Chopper - Idle Hands Show 2026

Every show has one bike people keep walking back to. At the Idle Hands Chopper Show this year it was Michael LaBree's. He's out of Vermont, and he showed up with a chopper that's got a 440 Arctic Cat snowmobile motor where a Harley engine should be. Everybody's already got a nickname for it. We just call it the snowmobile bike.

The Drivetrain

The motor is an early-'80s Arctic Cat 440 pulled out of a sled. It's bolted to a '79 Shovelhead transmission, so the back half of the driveline is pure Harley and the front half is pure Vermont winter. That's not a combo you find in a catalog. Mike figured it out himself.

All Stainless, All Scratch-Built

There's barely a bought part on this thing. Full stainless frame. Stainless tank. Stainless seat pan. Stainless pipes. Mike made every bit of it from scratch, and it's polished to the point where you can see the parking lot in the downtubes.

The front end is where it gets really weird, in a good way. It's a full aluminum front end built out of quarter-wall hex tubing, with triple trees cut from three-quarter plate and polished out. Hex tubing on a chopper front end is something you just don't see.

Rolling stock is 21-inch wheels front and back. With the long stainless frame and the skinny tires, the whole bike reads like a drag bike that wandered onto a frozen lake.

Built in Three Weeks (Sort Of)

Here's the part that'll make the rest of us feel lazy. Mike says he worked on the bike for maybe a month total over the last eleven months. Then, with three weeks to go, it was every night after work until it was done.

He was also playing the build-off game smart. He only posted enough progress to make it through each cut and kept the big stuff hidden. Nobody saw the seat. Nobody saw the tank. The front end got shown, but only a little. The goal was a real surprise at the end, and judging by the crowd around it, that worked.

Watch the Feature

Give Mike a follow on Instagram at @biginchelectraglide. Props to anyone who can make a snowmobile motor look this at home on two wheels.

Idle Hands 2026

The Idle Hands Chopper Show went down at Manchester Harley-Davidson in July, a grassroots build-off put on by the Lowlife Podcast with a $10,000 prize on the line. Catch the rest of the bikes in our Idle Hands 2026 photo dump.