At the end of January, 2023, the guys at YouTube channel Grind Hard Plumbing Co. Brought the world what we firmly believe could be the best worst idea ever: the Suzuki Hayabusa snow bike. They took a Timbersled kit meant for a much lighter-weight dirt bike, introduced it to a used Hayabusa that they’d picked up secondhand, and absolutely went to town with it in the snow at their Idaho headquarters.
When you come out of the gate with a project like the Hayabusa Snowbike, though, there’s only one problem: How do you top it? The simple answer is, of course, that you don’t. I mean sure, you could try to go bigger—but what if you could do a complete 180 and make a completely terrible creation as your follow-up instead?
As it happens, that’s exactly what GHPC decided to do. They took this poor, beleaguered Grom-alike that they’d gotten from Amazon some time ago, and which they’d built and re-built into multiple configurations in the past. From a street bike, to an off-road bike, to a trike, this thing has already been through so much—so why not turn it into a snowbike in its next life? At one point during the build, they even describe it as “the Hayabusa’s stupid little brother.”
While the Hayabusa had the benefit of a fancy Timbersled snowbike conversion kit, the GHPC guys decided that if it was going to be the worst, then they were going to go with a cheap little $200 snowbike conversion kit from Aliexpress instead. Thus, a project with multiple nicknames was born. Wish Dot Grom (splitting the difference, even though the kit didn’t actually come from Wish), Grombersled—take your pick.
Although the Timbersled kit no doubt had higher-spec componentry involved, since the team was bending it to their will on a bike that it wasn’t intended for, they ended up making plenty of modifications in order to get the rear track and the front ski assemblies to fit their application.
In that way, the Wish Dot Grom build was not completely dissimilar—only of course, when you buy a cheap, universal-fit kit, it rarely fits anything without extensive modification. In this case, they ended up designing and fabricating some custom brackets and a spindle to get the front ski mounted correctly, as well as doing a lot of work to the rear to get the track to mount reasonably straight.
At the end, they take both the completed Wish Dot Grom and the Hayabusa Snowbike out for a rip in the snow. Will the WDG wheelie? Uh … no, unfortunately not. After having ridden the Grom through all of its various transformations, it seems that the Wish Dot Grom is easily the worst possible build that it’s been through so far.
What will the team do next? Will the Grom undergo a future transformation into something even worse than this? Stay tuned.
