How to Date Vintage Snow Sleds

Snow sledding has been around for quite some time. It is the recreational practice of using fashioned wood and steel "sleds" or toboggans to slide down snow-covered hills. Over the years, there have been only a handful of changes in the overall design as the sled is not an incredibly complex piece of machinery. Snow sleds are designed to be durable and many vintage snow sleds are still usable. To find the date of a vintage snow sled, try a few options.

Look on the snow sled for the name of the manufacturer. Search the Internet for the manufacturer's name or go to the library and find a snow sled reference guide or magazines. Cross reference the manufacturer's name with the style of snow sled to get an approximate manufacturing date. Compare yours to pictures found in these publications.

Take it to an outdoor recreation sports supply store. Ask an employee familiar with snow sleds to look at your vintage snow sled to attempt to identify the manufacturer's name and the year it was built.

Take the vintage snow sled to an antiques dealer. Have an antiquities dealer look over your vintage snow sled. Most have reference guides that help to identify vintage items by manufacturer and/or construction style and materials.

Look in vintage magazines and through old newspaper copies. Manufacturers have always had to advertise their products in order to sell them. Picking up a vintage copy of "Look," "Time," "The New York Times" and other periodicals may help to identify the date. Also, look through vintage shopping catalogs, like "Sears and Roebuck."