IBEXX on Proper Clutching & Tuning, Generating More Power, How They Do It Differently & More

Okay, welcome to another episode of the Sledder Cast podcast. I'm Trevor Erikson, one of the hosts of the program. And we're lucky today, we've got the IBEXX crew here with us. We have Michael, William (Will, William), and Alex. We brought these guys in because I love watching and listening to podcasts, anything to do with snowmobiling. I love to just turn it on and learn and be involved with the industry. And I sat there and watched the episode you guys did with SnoWest about a month ago or so, and it was very enlightening to me. A lot of that stuff went over my head.

I kind of explained to you guys before this is probably going to be a little bit different of an episode, because I just didn't grow up with a wrench in my hand and underneath the hood of a machine. I rode the machines, but if that thing broke, I was in trouble. I didn't know how to fix it.

One of the things I wish I would have done differently: when I was in college up here, there was a small engine class. It was an elective, and I thought, I'm on four-wheelers and dirt bikes and stuff, I should probably have a basic knowledge of what's going on with these engines. So I enrolled. It was super early in the morning. The professor had us come into a shop and he had tables of small engines out. The first exam type thing was a paper with numbers, and each one of those engines had a number on it. Walk through the tables and tell me what type of engine this is. I looked at that paper, I looked at the tables, I put the paper down and I walked right out of that shop. I wish I would have just stayed in there and fought my way through it. But I didn't, and I'm paying the price now. That's why we brought you guys in.

So we're going to talk about what IBEXX does, a little bit about your company in general, and then more on the educational side. I'm going to be asking questions that hopefully someone else out there, maybe there's only one other person, but this is for you, him or her. We'll dial into the educational side of how clutching and how power to the ground works with snowmobiles, and how to enhance the performance of a snowmobile. I want to get into the nitty-gritty of that stuff, but let's start with IBEXX.

So we've got a father and two sons sitting here, right?

Mhm.

So tell me about the beginnings of IBEXX. Where the idea came from, what you guys were doing that transitioned into starting the company. Because you guys are probably relatively new for the industry, 2016 or 17?

End of 2016.

End of 2016 when IBEXX officially began. But you guys were doing cool stuff in the space, or in adjacent spaces, leading up to that point. So give me that founder's story. How did this all start?

Well, Dad started doing stuff on snowmobiles, I would say probably mid-80s, late 80s to early 90s, and that's where his passion kicked up. I wasn't overly interested in mechanics at that point, so William worked a lot with him on porting and piping sleds.

A lot of people in the industry may not know this, but Olav Aaen, of Aaen Performance, is basically the guy. Anybody that's done clutching in their life, especially where we come from, worked for him or knows about him or has read his book. He kind of pioneered everything, and Dad did a lot of work with him. And then obviously with SnoWest, they started Boondocker in 98, so that kind of went by the wayside a little bit.

William and I, our passion for sledding just grew year over year. We watched big name guys like Chris Burandt. Funnily enough, Boondocker was one of Chris Burandt's very first sponsors, before he got big.

Oh wow.

And in 2011 and 2012 there were new sleds coming out. I had just gotten out of high school.

In 2012?

Well, I got out in 2009.

You're just a young... Are you younger?

No, I'm older.

What year did you graduate?

06.

06? Got some young bucks over here, sheesh.

Yeah, so we fake it till we make it. But anyway, in 12, Polaris came out with the Pro R, or the Pro in 11, and then Ski-Doo had the XM.

The XM, and then they went to the...

Yeah. So we bought all three sleds, and Boondocker was going to start tuning them and doing powersports stuff. We kind of headed that up. Silver Turbos, who the industry knows pretty well, came to us wanting to do ECM downloading. He saw the future going that way, because you have a lot more control, you know what's going on. So he did that and gave us a turbo kit to tune.

And William got this really stupid cool idea to try this weight. We'd kind of wondered, in the industry the 10 series profile that Polaris developed is a fantastic profile, but it was developed on older sleds. All we had done was add more weight, stiffer springs, all that stuff. So we got this crazy idea to try a curved weight, and we started looking at the clutching from a scientific, geometry level to see if we could make something different.

So it all started in, I think it was 2013, 2014. He cut a set of weights, and it's been refined a ton since then, but we could come out of the hole on an old turboed sled without the bypasses. We could come out of the hole on a stock sled. It gave the stock sled that bottom end that everybody has been crying for for the past 20 years.

Then they ended up selling the business in 14, so there was a little bit of a weird transition. In 15 I quit, and in 16 he quit, and he wanted to start a clutching business. And I knew about as much about clutching as you probably do.

Yeah. Yep.

Or did. It just didn't make any sense. I'm like, there's a belt. Cool. Let's go ride.

Yeah, yeah.

So that's kind of the way it started from my point of view. I don't know if he or Dad has a different one. They probably had a little bit more stress than I did. I was just like, whoa.

So you're more on the marketing, sales and operations side?

Yeah.

And William is the engineer of the product, right?

Yeah, the way that I put it is I'm the looks of the business and he's the brains. And we're kind of screwed on both aspects of it.

Hey, but it's good that you each have your own side.

Yeah, we're definitely different on that side, right? He was salutatorian in his class, and I was number 26 out of 50.

26 out of 50?

Yeah, I didn't even break the top 50%.

Can you believe that? You just barely missed it.

That would have been in Aberdeen. The business is out of American Falls.

American Falls, yeah. So we're headquartered in Rexburg, Idaho, and you guys are in American Falls.

It's about an hour 20, hour and a half.

Yeah, just south of us.

Yep. Small little town, 1,800 people in Aberdeen, and there's what, 5,000 in American Falls?

5,000 in American Falls.

Nice. Okay. And so when did Dad come into the picture here, because you guys are kind of over here scheming some things?

I would say where he comes in a lot is the marketing side. We just don't enjoy it. We love interaction with people. We can talk your ear off for days, as everybody can probably see. But trying to get the word out about who we are and what we do is the biggest difficulty that I think William and I...

Yeah. We never saw that part of Boondocker, because he worked in engineering, he worked in IT, I worked in the tech department and QA. So we'd been around how the business ran, but not the sales and marketing side of stuff. We never ventured into that. So I think his biggest asset to us was his experience on the marketing side, having been there before and seen...

Yeah, seen a company grow like that.

Right. And so define your marketing. Are you old school marketing, or are you keeping up with all the kids these days, running with them?

I don't do social media.

No social media?

Don't like any of that stuff. Kids would come to me at Bully Dog and ask, what would you go to school for? I'd say I'd go to school for marketing. But now I'm not sure I would, because everybody that goes to school for marketing gets put in the same box. And it might be really good stuff, but you and I as customers, about the 32,000th time we've seen the same type of ad, we get real tired of it and we shut off. So my thing with marketing is to always look for what will stand out in the crowd.

I did lots of things like that. At Hay Days, they had these rusty water tanks driving around. I called them and said, would you mind if I wrapped your truck? I'll put a wrap on there so the truck looks nice for you. And I put Bully Dog on the truck, and the whole time they're driving trucks up and down the aisles with Bully Dog on them. So I like to think of ways that are outside the box.

We gave t-shirts away at SEMA once. Lots of people went to the SEMA board and tried to stop us. There was no rule against having t-shirts. We bought $20,000 worth of t-shirts, which is very cheap for SEMA.

People can still do it. I think people just don't know how to do something sometimes.

We would give everybody a t-shirt as long as they would put it on before they left the booth. And if they left it on, we had people running around SEMA who would give them a little ticket, and they could come back and win $100 for the day if they kept their shirt on. So we had, I don't know, 10,000 t-shirts running around advertising.

Yeah, that was probably the most powerful marketing that's ever been done.

And the next couple of years, people would always come up, do you have t-shirts? Do you have t-shirts? We want t-shirts. I think we did it twice. So I like to think outside the box. In marketing, I enjoy watching for the gaps.

And that's needed. A lot of that is old school marketing, but the old school stuff is what's getting forgotten these days, and that stuff still works, right? I think the magic is when you can sprinkle in the old school stuff with some of the new school stuff. And shoot, this is at least the second podcast you guys have been on, right? You guys are out there doing new things and building and growing the business. So Dad comes in with the marketing side, that been there, done that leadership for the company.

At the end of 2016 it happens. Did you guys launch into snow, or were you first into the dirt, the side-by-side?

The snow stuff was our first attack. Like Alex said, we started with some basic snowmobile clutching before we even started the business. The dirt stuff from 16 on has grown like crazy, but before that we personally weren't even in the dirt scene much. It wasn't a market we even knew.

Yep. Okay. So you started with the snowmobiling side. So walk me through the end of 2016 to now. What has changed about IBEXX? Are you still operating in the same facility? Is it just the three of you running the show? Walk me through what that transition looks like to today, towards the end of 2023.

The facility's the same. We did switch and then switched back. We have five, six employees now, helping out with shipping and tech support, and marketing and sales as well. And we've shifted from snow to where we're probably close to 50/50 snow and dirt now.

Really?

The dirt has exploded for sure, and we did see it real quick early on. We didn't just do snow for more than a year. I think we were in the dirt by 17.

Okay.

And that kind of grew. In particular, the Can-Am X3 came out in 17, and we started working on it at the same time this new, completely extravagant buggy came out. It changed the industry. Now there's a lot of amazing buggies out there, but at that point it was kind of like, whoa, where'd that come from? And we hit that at the right time, so we grew with it.

Yep. Right place, right time.

Yeah.

Okay. And what about knowing what you guys know now? You're six years into IBEXX. Is there anything you would have done differently if you were to start the company over again right now?

Probably 100% of it. Our research and development cabinet would probably be a lot smaller, because we know what we know now. When we came into the industry in 17, we knew everything. And now we know more than we knew then.

Yep.

But less than we will know.

CVT stuff, some people call it black magic. It's understanding the profile stuff and how the belts work. The clutching book was a huge help to all of us, and then learning from other people in the industry. We don't know everything. Our clutch kits work phenomenal, but there's always something more to learn.

This turbo that these guys just came out with, that we're now using on our Catalyst kit, has completely redefined the way turbochargers work. I argued with the guy that sold it to me for a year. I was like, there's no way, dude. There's no way it's that much better. And that's the thing with clutching too. There is so much more that we haven't discovered, mankind itself, people in our industry, us. So we're always trying to keep moving forward, developing different stuff, learning different things. Our R&D cabinet is bigger than our production cabinet, because we have failed so many different times trying something new to see what happens. And I'm sure there's other people that can say the same thing.

Yeah. The quicker you're able to fail, the quicker you get to the solution. The more attempts and shots you take at it, the more reps you get.

When you fail, you learn.

Yep.

We know 100 different ways not to do it.

So you don't really fail.

Yeah, exactly. So tell them a little bit about what you started with, and the different steps you've picked up, and where you are today.

So our initial setup was just clutch weights.

Primary.

Primary clutch weights. They're the little arms that go into the primary.

Which in today's terms would be similar to a stage one kit, right?

Yes. The stage one kit in most markets is a set of the little flyweights and generally a primary spring. Sometimes they'd do a secondary spring with it. That's kind of where we started. We basically only worked with the primary itself initially.

What we found, and maybe we'll go into a little more detail later, but from an overview, was that the changes we were making, although they made improvements, had some very bad side effects. It took a little while to figure out what that was and why we were having this problem.

We met with a fellow out of Minnesota. He was another clutching pioneer type guy. He's in his 90s now, still kicking as far as we know. I haven't talked to him for a few years. He was focused on the secondary. We went out there and he gave us the ropes and explained how secondaries work, and that's when the light bulbs started popping on: our issues are related to what's going on in the secondary.

So then we started messing with the secondary, and the Can-Am X3 really taught us a lot, because there were quite a lot of things in it that were different from the snowmobiles, which brought out and exposed these problems a little more obviously. That was good. We ended up developing, and I'm not going to go into too much detail because it's proprietary, a new way to cut helixes, and we have a very proprietary helix.

Largely what's out there works fine with the primary stuff that's out there. But because we do the primary so differently, we had to develop something in the secondary to match it, and it took a while to figure that out. So we dropped the line of stage ones because of the nature of the side effects, and we provide full packages with the secondary, which most of the industry knows as a stage two.

So let me chime in here. Explain to the snowmobiler who has heard of the primary and secondary clutch but doesn't understand them: what's the key role of the primary, and what's the key role of the secondary clutch? And we should shout out that you've got your own YouTube channel.

Yes.

We're going to talk about some of these terms, call it an educational deep dive, but you've got your own YouTube channel where you go into further detail on the clutching.

Yeah, it's called My Clutching Guy.

So My Clutching Guy on YouTube. If you want to just nerd out on clutching, that's the resource to head over to. Cool. So, primary and secondary. Explain to us the key role of each of those.

Okay. Let me know if I get too deep.

I will.

So the basic overview, to start with the words primary and secondary: the primary is the pulley that is on the engine. It's bolted to the engine.

Drive.

It's also known as the drive pulley. After what we've learned, I like the word drive better than primary, because primary gives it the aspect that it's the smarts behind it. It's not. The secondary, or the driven pulley, is the one that is connected to the transmission on a UTV, or what is called the drive jackshaft on the snowmobile. It is driven by the belt, and the drive is at the engine.

CVTs in general, and Alex has actually been good at explaining it, work the same as a 10-speed bicycle. You look at the front and you've usually got three different size sprockets, and however many in the back depending on your gears, 10 or 20. Every time you shift one of those gears, the sprocket size changes, and that's what gives you your gear ratio. To go faster, the front sprocket size needs to get bigger and your back one goes smaller.

What a CVT does is make the front one bigger and the back one smaller at the exact same time, so you can keep the same length. Your bicycle has that goofy set of sprockets with a little spring on it that keeps the chain tight. That's because you're only shifting one side at a time. On a CVT both sides shift at exactly the same time, so your belt kind of does this.

The concept of continuously variable is that it's moving 100% of the time. A lot of people think, oh, when I hit 8,000 RPM, my clutch is shifted out. No, it's not. That's when your clutching setup is matching your horsepower input and your load input from the back side. A lot of people call it shift out RPM. I find that a somewhat poor explanation, because at least in my head that means it's closed and it's done. It's not. That's the RPM you're clutched for. What I consider shift out is when the clutches are fully closed, and that's the fastest you can go with the size of the pulleys and the gear ratio and the tire or track sizes. All of the numbers together, that's the fastest you can go at a certain RPM.

And that's the field that you guys play in.

That's one of a few fields we play in. That would probably be the one we play in the least, because of the mountain segment we come from.

It depends on your definition of shift out, but we play like a mountain sled. The Boost and the Ski-Doo turbo have changed how much track speed you can run, but back before that stuff, you're at 8,000 feet, building anywhere from 130 to 160 horse most of the time. Your average track speed wide open would be about 35 to 45 miles an hour. That's the segment we play in the most, zero to 50, because the Boost and stuff now will pull 50, 55 miles an hour. And I'm talking 3 feet of powder straight up the hill, nothing changing. You didn't get a 100 mile run towards the hill where you can hit it at 75 miles an hour. So the part we probably play with the least would be your very top speed, which is what he was talking about.

Cool. So before we jumped into the primary and secondary, we were going in a direction of IBEXX the company. We talked about the transition you've had, the trial and error, what you've picked up along the way. Now, looking from 2023 into the future, what excites you guys the most about what you've got cooking, and the industry in general?

Can I interject back to the clutch for just one second? I think they missed one point. What they have concentrated on is getting the clutches to transition shift points faster than any other setup in the market. So if you go from hard pack to soft snow, or soft snow to hard pack, you will gain lengths on other sleds or other setups very quickly, because their stuff transitions the shift quicker than any other setup.

Okay.

That has to do with the shift ratio he was talking about. So we kind of got off track there.

Exactly.

He tries to make it sound all good.

No, and the other thing is our biggest focus and our biggest advantage. I'm going to use a somewhat technical term: we always focus on horsepower under the curve.

Okay. Never heard that before.

If you go put an engine on a dyno, just straight up an engine, your engine produces horsepower in a curve. Have you seen a dyno sheet before?

Me? I've never seen a dyno sheet before.

So your engine, if you have a 400 horsepower engine, that's 400 horsepower at a given RPM. Let's say it's 8,000, since we're working in snowmobiles. That would be a really powerful one, but it exists. That's at 8,000 RPM, but at 3,000 RPM that engine doesn't make 400 horsepower. It only makes 160. So you have this curve.

Now when you add clutching to it, that curve changes. You don't have 100% of that horsepower at zero miles an hour. Your clutching will come in and create its own curve. The problem is sometimes that curve doesn't match the engine. You can't make more horsepower than your engine's making, but what we focus on is grabbing that horsepower as early as possible and holding it as long as possible.

So a lot of our competitors' horsepower dyno charts will look like a mountain top. Ours look like a plateau. Our peak output isn't always more. We're usually within two or three horsepower, because they're hitting the peak the engine is producing. You can shift it a little bit, but you're not going to make a massive amount more. But in between, we're holding it.

You just explained that really well. I was struggling a little bit in that last section. So that's the horsepower under the curve you're talking about, right?

It's underneath there. There's way more horsepower in there, underneath the very peak horsepower.

In CVTs, that's the beautiful thing about CVTs. They are designed to hold peak power as long as possible. And that's peak power of the engine. If the engine's got 400 horse here and 300 here and 200 here, you're not going to make 400 horse here. You're going to make 200 there, 300 here and 400 here. So what we try to do is get it to peak power at that RPM as quick as possible.

There's a lot of guys, especially with the new UTV that just came out, saying, oh, this dual clutch transmission is going to kill a belt. Well, there's enough evidence out there now that it's not exactly like that. With a CVT, you start out in such a low range gear, because it's the tiniest sprocket in the front and the biggest one in the back, so they come out of the hole really hard.

And that's what we try to focus on, especially because the whole snowmobile industry, especially in the mountains, has transitioned towards tree riding. In his generation, it was the most horsepower, shoot straight up a hill and scare your buddy. Our generation doesn't have the cojones to do that. We like the trees.

We also like the views.

Yeah, and the views. So getting into peak horsepower of that motor as fast as we can, at every given RPM, is what we focus on. We might run two horsepower under our competitors or two horsepower over, but we're going to hold it longer. That's the benefit, that horsepower for a much longer time rather than a little bit more at a very small window.

So this curve, when you're talking track speed: on an engine dyno you're looking at it versus engine RPM. On a track or wheel dyno, when you're working with a CVT, you're generally looking at it versus vehicle speed. The reason for that is a CVT's goal is to get to peak horsepower, like he said, so let's use 8,000 as we referenced before, as quickly as possible. A lot of times, especially when you get into the turbo world, you'll find them really sluggish. They don't reach that 8,000 until they're doing, say, 25 mph. Whereas we will hit 8,000 at 10, and then we will hold it.

A lot of times you'll see RPM fall off or gain. And a lot of people think more RPM is better. No. Not always. The piping and the engine itself have to be developed to run that RPM, or it doesn't make more power. So we want to hold it as flat as possible for every given speed. And most people don't realize it. They'll look at a competitor's chart and see peak horsepower at 70 mph. That's cool. How often are you at 70?

Especially when you're riding mountains, right? Never.

Never. If you are, you have a fast sled.

You have a fast sled.

One of the other things they've done with their clutching kit that is important to mention: you start with the horsepower dyno of the engine. Now you understand the dynamics of the engine, and you can load the clutch according to what that horsepower number is. Then, when they have these transitions of shifting that we spoke about earlier: peak horsepower is generally, not always, but generally at a higher RPM than peak torque. So with the clutching, you want to stay up there close to peak horsepower. And when you go into a heavier load, like deep snow or a transition into a steep hill, you don't want to fall under peak torque, or all of a sudden you lose whatever advantage your engine has over the buddy you're trying to beat right there.

Yep.

So you want to stay in between, because your torque number is always at a lower RPM than your horsepower.

You want to come up and run right in between them, where if you lose a little bit of RPM... And that's what we focus on with our backshift. When your buddy goes across the hill and you've got to jump a trench, when you hit down hard, your track gets extra load. Learning how secondaries work, we focused our helix on backshifting faster. So it'll drop and get into that lower gear quick. It needs to go to a lower gear and then it'll come back up, right?

Whereas in a lot of the videos I've watched, we'll see guys pull RPM down 200, 300 RPM. They don't really pull below the torque, but they lose a lot of horsepower, if you will, by dropping way down that far. So we focused on trying to make it so you don't really lose RPM.

And one of the things we've noticed more recently, and I keep referencing turbos because turbos have very bizarre power characteristics: you have no power and then you've got a lot. So you have a really strange power characteristic to work with, and we're using profile to attack that. That's the shape of the weight. I've noticed a lot of our competitors are purposely over-revving the engine to make up for a lack of profile. You can even hear it sometimes. They're climbing a hill, pop, pop, pop. You can hear them whacking their rev limiter, because they're trying to keep the tree characteristics as good as possible, and they're massively sacrificing the hill climb characteristics. With the technology we use, which we call advanced profile technology, both in the helix and the primary, we focus on developing the shape of the weight to handle both situations.

What's the role of the helix? Because the helix is on the secondary. I haven't played with a lot of them, but we've had some on our snowmobiles, and they've got different profiles that I've seen. So what's the helix's job there? Go ahead. I'm asking for a friend.

Yeah, exactly. There you go.

I'm asking for Mike.

So, as I mentioned earlier, I struggle with primary and secondary, although I use the words all the time, because actually the secondary, or the driven, is the brains. It's the boss. It's the one in there going, yeah, this is what I want.

Yep.

And deep inside that is the helix. The helix is really the mini computer of the situation.

Okay.

The best way I can explain what it's doing is a torque wrench. Say you've got to tighten a bolt to 100 ft-lbs. You're twisting on this torque wrench, and you get up close to 100. If you have a short torque wrench, it's going to take a lot of effort to twist that. Get it longer and it's a lot easier, but it takes longer to turn. If you're trying to go 90 degrees with the little short one versus the big old long one, the long one takes longer. So you have both aspects to deal with.

What we do is adjust the angle of the helix. If you make it shallower than the industry standard, it's like lengthening that wrench out. You get way more sensitivity. It recognizes the changes in the ground, from soft snow to hard snow. It recognizes the feedback from the track way better than a steep helix, which would be more like the short wrench. The problem is it takes longer to move, because it has a longer track to move. It's got more distance to move. So you have to balance those two things. Otherwise you would just go as shallow as you can, because it's going to be more sensitive, but you can't do that.

What we found out is a combination. We do use shallower helixes than most, because it's kind of the equal and opposite in the primary. We have the flyweights, and because we've been able to develop flyweights that are way lighter, everything can move faster. So we can find a balance of the whole system at a shallower angle than a conventional setup, which has to be steeper because of the extra weight, to be able to move at a reasonable rate. So in the primary, we use the same torque concept.

Yep.

It's hard to show. I wish I'd have brought some props. You've got your bolt that goes through a weight, and that weight has an arm with a curve to it. Like I mentioned earlier, your clutches are always shifting, and there's a roller that the weight is sitting against. When you're in neutral or really low, say 10 mph, you're down here. Its action is moving in this direction to close and clamp the belt. So when you're down low, you're at almost 90 degrees to it. Anybody can go grab a toolbox or a couch in the house. If you're pushing directly against the toolbox, it's not that hard to move. Now you get out at, say, 70 mph, and you're like this. So take that toolbox, put yourself at the wrong angle, and try to push on it. Suddenly you need another person to help you push, because your force is going this way now instead of this way.

So what we did is curve that down. Now it comes out a little further, and my angle is still 90.

Okay, there we go.

That gives us the torque effect of extending that arm, but because of that extra force, we make up for the distance traveled and can drop the weight massively. What are we, 15 to 20% lighter?

In the helix?

No, in the weights.

Yeah, the weights in the primary. We're 15 to 20% lighter, and in an extreme situation, like on the Pro R RZRs, we're actually 50%. We're half the weight.

Holy cow.

Everybody can understand trying to throw something around in a circle. You grab a string and put a golf ball on it and spin it around, versus throwing a basketball around, it's harder. And try to stop it, it's even harder. So if we make that lighter, your rotating mass drops.

Which is what the whole industry's about, right? Lighter. The 9R's got a lightweight crank on it, and you can do carbon fiber and titanium bolts and take weight out of the flywheel, and then they go and put 78 gram weights in it. And you're going, why not put 56 gram weights in there and pull the same RPM?

On clutching, the dumbed down version for me is weight. Weight equals force, and that's force against the belt. Everybody knows if you go and add a pipe to your sled, you've got to add weight. Well, we drop weight. We don't drop force, because weight equals force. We just drop weight, because we're directing the force in the direction we want it to go.

So there are basically three things we've come to that go into a weight. You've got your profile. You've got your center of mass, because where your center of mass is on that weight is how you manipulate the shift profile as well. And then your overall mass, 60 grams, 70 grams, 80 grams. A lot of companies we see only mess with two of them. They mess with the center of mass and the overall weight, and they spring it differently and all that. Well, we went to the extreme and went down the profile road and said, okay, we're going to curve this profile to try to make it more efficient.

So when we say we put more power to the ground, that's what we're doing. We're making everything more efficient. If you take the 2,300 horsepower trucks they have now and put them on an old Duramax Allison transmission from 2002, you've got all this motor power, but you're never going to move the truck, because it's just going to slip. With a lighter weight, we're having a more efficient shift. We're wasting less energy. That's what you want. Peak engine efficiency is wasting the least amount of energy you can, and that's what we've done with our profile curve. Of course, there were a lot more challenges in curving the profile than we had originally thought, but you live and learn, right?

That's why we're so different from our competitors, and it's why we don't do a stage one, because our flyweights would work, but you don't get the biggest benefit out of them without doing the secondary too.

Yeah. Gotcha.

And we've had the equal question the other way around. Oh, I see your helix works great, can I use it with mine? Same thing. It won't work. In fact, that one works even less than putting in only the primary, because of the profile stuff we've created on the helixes.

Yeah. So your helix takes all the feedback from your track, from your ground, dirt, snow, sand, rocks, and it transfers all that through the transmission. You follow the line: it goes through the belt drive on a Polaris, up through the jackshaft, back into the secondary to the motor. And it's telling the primary, hey, I'm getting more feedback, my track is starting to pull harder on me, I need you to downshift just a little bit. Or, hey buddy, we're accelerating, we're getting out of here, let's upshift, let's put this thing in high gear and go. It's telling the primary what to do. And the primary is just over there going, I love life. It's just trying to hold RPM.

These guys are a lot smarter than I was giving them credit for.

Oh, we told you. We fake it till we make it, I tell you.

You guys have tapped into that zen.

Just before you move on, a couple of things, because you asked where the business has come from. Obviously clutching is where they've come from. Now they're into turbochargers, tuning and the new air intake stuff for the Polarises.

Which is an absolute must, might I add. The intake on the Polarises, unfortunately, and it's a good thing for us, bad thing for them, doesn't have enough air. And engines have got to breathe. So we developed a drop-in. You basically pull those two screws, pull the vent off the side there, and install ours. It takes less than 5 minutes, and it gives you about 375% more on the left side and about 350% more on the right side.

And on the right side we've developed an under air piece, so that if for some odd reason the vents get blocked, it will open and start sucking hot engine air, which isn't ideal, but it's better than no air. And the way we developed it, it follows the body lines of the sled, so the snow will naturally fall off from the movement and the vibration. It's not sticking in the side there. There are other aspects that come into it, but I finally went out last year, in April or March, and there was 4 feet of powder, so I could really put them to the test. I had a couple of guys out there that were bogging, and I wasn't bogging at all. I actually have a video of it. You could see my vents. There's snow on them, but there's probably 200% of it still wide open, so it can breathe, and that's what you need for the engine. Sorry, but I had to point that out, because those things are phenomenal.

Yeah, so more product development.

Right. Okay.

And ice scratchers. We do a ton of ice scratchers. That was probably the second thing that really took off.

Yeah, when you Google IBEXX, IBEXX ice scratchers is one of the first popular searches it thinks you want.

It's our most sold product.

So what's the difference? We were looking at the stock Polaris ones, that are...

Sweet if you don't back up.

Yeah, they're extremely average, right?

They work if you don't back up.

So what's your guys' ice scratcher?

They're reversible. We designed them to be reversible. In his day it wasn't a problem, because they didn't have reverse. Now I can't even dream of having a sled without reverse. So when I get out of the trailer with my Boost, I put them down, and I don't put them back up until I get back to the trailer. Reversing, driving forward, however many times you do it in a day, they flip backwards and then flip back forward to go forward. And they're stiffer than a lot of the OEM ones out there, so they scratch the ice a lot harder. They throw up more snow, so your hyfax is cooler and your engine temperatures are down. I think a couple of guys out there have done some testing where it'll keep the sled anywhere from 20 to 30 degrees cooler than a factory OEM one. So they've been a huge success for us.

Cool.

And regardless of whose turbocharger you have, they can tune pretty much all of those turbochargers. Several of the other turbocharger companies out there use IBEXX, or people in the aftermarket will come when they have a problem and say, hey, I'm not getting this to run quite right. Then they put an IBEXX tune on it, and that helps pretty substantially to get other turbos up to speed.

Yeah.

Cool. Jumping back into looking forward. We've got new product development, and you guys are going to all the shows. You had some presence out at Hay Days on the IBEXX side of things. You're going to the Edmonton show, you're going to do the Utah show, the Idaho show.

Mhm.

I didn't make it to the Denver, Colorado show.

Yeah, that's going on today.

Yeah, actually at the time of our recording.

We've never been to that show either. It's on our list, but we just haven't ever been, so I don't have any idea of what to report on. And we were planning on doing one at the end of the month up in Montana, but...

Yeah, that one got pulled.

Anything else as far as the company? If there are some athletes out there who want to get involved with you guys, what kind of athlete program do you have?

We have an affiliate program and an ambassador program. They just have to email us, and then we'll give them the paperwork to sign and the stipulations and stuff.

What are you guys looking for? If you could craft your perfect sledder athlete ambassador, what does that look like for IBEXX?

I don't want an athlete that says our stuff is good just because we throw product at them. We want people that truly love it. And if they don't love it, they tell us why, so we can make it lovable. I want somebody to put our clutch kit on, put our tuning on, put our vents on, put everything on and go, you know, these guys care. They want everybody to go out on the deep powder days and enjoy it, because we only get maybe two or three of those a year.

And 2 years ago, I think in Colorado and Wyoming after Christmas, if you stoked it up then, you got it. I went riding with my Boost to try to get it out of break-in. There were guys that rode in December and got their Boosts, and they were like, oh yeah, I got that out of break-in in 100 miles. I was at 350 before I got out, because I couldn't hold it pinned, otherwise I'd go over the top of the mountain at 65 miles an hour. No snow.

So we want people that are going to love our product and run it and promote it, obviously. We want to get the word out that our clutching is meant for the riders. We've got some ambassadors going this year that I think are going to be very honest and very truthful about how our product works.

Perfect. And does your program open and close, or do you keep it open year-round?

Open year-round.

Kind of what we do as well.

Yeah. There'll obviously be more of a winter and a summer program, because not everybody that snowmobiles does UTVs and not everybody that does UTVs snowmobiles, but a lot of guys cross over. In the UTV world, just as we're starting to come out of UTV season, we've picked up a couple of racers.

How old's that kid? Is he like 16 years old, with that RZR? The RZR Turbo that was down there at Invasion.

Oh yeah. Hastings? Yeah, I think that's right. He's 16, 17, somewhere in there, and a phenomenal driver. His buggy kept overheating because he would have to stop and wait, like in the drag races and stuff, and they were like, well, we don't really do this, so our motors... But he does short course racing and he's a phenomenal driver. So you transition each season, right?

So let's jump into the lightning round, guys. I gave you a little prep before we started here. I can see your faces light up on this one. I think I have an idea of where you're going to go, but you're all going to pick different machines, right? The first question in our lightning round: you've got a brand new machine, you just picked it up, and you can only do three mods on it. What are the three things you're going to do to that machine to get it to ride the way you want it to ride? You only get three, so you've got to be selective. Go ahead. What are you riding? You'd be on a Ski-Doo?

So I would put in a clutch kit, and I would put in a downloader.

A tuner?

A tuner. Yep, tune the engine. Downloader's an old term. Those two complement each other.

What tuner are you using?

IBEXX does tuning on that. If somebody's looking at a Ski-Doo one, I challenge you to find anything better. Especially on the G4s, they found things that nobody else has ever gotten to. So that makes the two of them complement each other.

You're talking about a Ski-Doo Turbo?

Ski-Doo Turbo sled. Yep. And I'd probably put on a set of ice scratchers. Even though Ski-Doo's ice scratchers are pretty good, they just don't put much pressure down.

So you're going clutching first, get the bad boy tuned up, and then ice scratchers. I'm going to go out on a limb and say I don't know if anyone else is going to have ice scratchers in their three.

You've got to save the rails, man.

Yep. Okay. So that's the Ski-Doo. William, you want to go next?

Yeah, I guess I'll have to go with Arctic Cat.

Okay, so we're on an Arctic Cat. Now, is this an Ascender chassis, or are we talking the Catalyst, because you guys have a 600 Catalyst you've been playing with?

Yeah, let's count the Catalyst. We're on the Catalyst. I would do clutching and a turbo kit right off the bat, which includes the tuning and everything, the whole package, so my 600 can perform. And I like suspension, so I would spend money on shocks. Make it ride better. It helps handling and it helps the ride. I've got a bad back, so I like having it be cushy.

Yep.

And our ice scratchers don't fit on the Alpha, otherwise I'd go with the ice scratchers as well.

Man, that sled's pretty flipping good out of the box.

Bags.

Yeah. Bags, bags. Some bags on there.

The Ski-Doo LinQ system is pretty phenomenal.

Yeah. The new Cat one I don't have any experience with yet. It could be pretty good.

We've seen a few. It's pretty legit. It's pretty sweet. Better than the nonexistent Ascender options.

Yeah.

Okay, so we've got a Polaris left and we have a Lynx. You're going to go Polaris?

Yeah. If I bought a Lynx, I'd probably just sell it and buy a Polaris, you know.

I have a Lynx. I like it. So you're riding Polaris. What model?

Boost.

You're going to go Boost, okay.

Yeah. The reason we're all basically on turbos: the NAs are cool, they're fun, but even with the Polaris RZR with a 2-liter motor at 225 horse, we put a turbo on it. You can't beat turbos. They're fun. So I've got a Boost. The first three things you've basically got to do to it to make it ridable: the intake vents...

The updates. Yeah, let's start with the updates. Get your handlebar, the hooks, right?

Yeah, your recalls.

Get your recalls done. I don't think those count as one of the three, right? We won't count those. All right. We also don't count a wrap. I noticed that wasn't one of your three.

Well, I don't know. You guys were talking sticker power.

No, you read your thing. It said no wraps.

But if you do, go Deviant. I'm telling you right now. So, the vents, because that first year was an odd year, but I immediately saw it as soon as I talked to one of our dealers in Boise. They were constantly holding it like this. And the problem is it's a $23,000 sled. That's not fun. So the first thing I'd do would be my vents, and then the clutching.

Our Boost clutching really stands out, because the bottom end of the Boost is not quite as good as a lot of people would like. Our clutching definitely wakes that up. The profile change that we do means it doesn't overload the motor like conventional clutching does. And then I'd probably do a track.

Track? I've heard that one. That one's been one of the three.

I'm pretty excited about the 3.25 track, but I did a Lynx track. I think I lost about 8 miles an hour of track speed going to a Lynx track, but I gained probably 4 or 5 miles an hour of ground speed.

Wow.

At least in my opinion, in the circles that I'm in, that gets overlooked a lot. I talked to one of their ambassador guys, and he said the problem with the Lynx track is apparently it trenches, which I don't know, I don't see the whole trenching thing. I had the 2.75 track when it came out, and we were riding in 22, which was just a horrible season, so I didn't give it a fair chance. But still, I don't regret changing the track to the Lynx track.

And I just talked to somebody from Chris Burandt's team, and he said the 3.25 is kind of right in between. It doesn't have the stiffness of the 3 inch Ski-Doo track, but it doesn't have the softness of the 2.75. He said he hasn't put it on a Boost, but watching Chris run, it's a phenomenal track. But Chris makes a lot of things look phenomenal, so...

Yeah.

But that's probably the three things I'd do. Definitely clutching, obviously the intake vents, and then probably a track, if money's not an object.

Yeah. Love it.

Okay, that was lightning round question one. Question two is: what's something that most everyone watching this probably doesn't know about you guys, whether it's IBEXX in general or you guys personally?

Yeah, how long is this going to take?

We had a good laugh, because I was giving them some examples, and I said Matt, Muskoka Freerider, told me no broken bones and a finger chopped off. And all of a sudden these guys whipped out their thumbs.

Yeah, so that's something we connect on a lot.

And this is not from birth?

Not from birth.

Different accidents?

Different accidents, different times.

Same industry.

Same industry.

Agriculture. We were farmers. Back when he was 4 years old, he was running his hand across the top of the chain and decided to grab it and see what happens. Well, the sprocket went around like that, so it cut his right one off.

And then in 2011...

And that was on a grain cart, right? That you did it?

Yeah, it was a planter grain cart, for filling up the grain planter.

Yep. And we were changing the axle on a combine, and I stuck my finger through a hole because the pin wouldn't go all the way through, and there were washer shims. And I told my grandpa, who unfortunately has passed away, lift it up just a little bit. He let it down.

And there went the tip of your thumb.

Yeah, bye-bye. Pretty fun. I came out of there in complete shock, just looking at it.

Oh yeah, blood's probably just gushing.

It was just because tendons were sticking out. It was pretty wild looking.

And in 2011, so you were a junior in high school? A sophomore?

No, I was 20. I graduated in 09.

Okay, yeah. There you go.

He hasn't broken any bones. I have. My collarbone, and I fractured my back. Other than that...

So besides sharing some of those things with Muskoka Freerider, is there any other thing that would just shock us? Holy cow. He's got his brain going. You can see something's turning behind his eyes.

I was a Ski-Doo dealer for 1 year. That's probably what spurred a lot of this on. Mr. Performax was the name of the business then. I started working on people's sleds. Then we closed down the business, because that's an expensive proposition when you're a brand new dealer and you have to take on sleds that are 1, 2, 3 years old from the old stock. A pretty unfair disadvantage to start with, so that didn't last very long, but I continued working on sleds after that.

And that was 1999?

98, 99.

Was this down in Aberdeen or American Falls?

That one was in Aberdeen.

That one was in Aberdeen. Yep. And that was 1 year and done.

One and done right there. Lesson number one.

There you go. You've got to get those out of the way sooner than later, right?

Yep. Well, that's our problem. We keep getting told it takes 10 businesses to succeed, one of them will succeed. So we started 10.

There you go. Get the first nine done with.

Yep. Get them out of the way.

Throw as many noodles on the wall as you can and hope one of those suckers sticks.

Exactly. Forgot to throw any glue on them, though.

Nice. Okay, well, this is IBEXX. Appreciate you guys stopping in today. I know it's kind of a drive for you. I learned a lot about machining and clutching and how my snowmobile works, so I appreciate you guys dumbing some things down.

Well, hopefully we can make it simple enough.

Yeah, or make it confusing enough.

That's the best way to go about it, just make things simple so everyone understands.

KISS. Keep it simple, stupid, baby.

There we go. That's the best way. Is there anything else you guys want to share with the snowmobile community out there?

IBEXX on socials. ibexx.com, two x's. Follow us on Instagram and Facebook and TikTok.

We know Michael's not running those.

Nope.

There's a thing we do on TikTok. It's called Gooner.

Yeah, I've seen him.

It's getting more popular, for sure.

Wait, who is Gooner?

It started out as one of my employees being a jokester, and he put it on my face.

Is it you?

Yeah.

Okay. Now I'm going to have to go back and watch those videos. It's on Instagram too, not just TikTok, right?

Yeah, we share them across most social media.

So if you haven't heard about Gooner yet...

And he comes out with all sorts of deals every once in a while too. So if you're not watching him...

Get to know Gooner.

Yeah, he's a goofball. Sometimes a little embarrassing, not going to lie. But I love making people laugh, so you know.

There you go. That's what it's all about. Okay, well, thanks guys. Thanks for stopping in.

Thank you. Thanks, Trevor. We really appreciate you. This happened fast. We all have shows and businesses to run this fall, and it was like, all right, let's do it tomorrow or it ain't going to happen for months.

Appreciate it. Thanks, guys.

Thank you.