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jdemaris
04-08-2004 06:02:03
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Re: Re: sm. crawler comparison in reply to Karen, 04-08-2004 03:57:44
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Fired up? No, I only do that when someone pees down my back and tells me it's raining. Or, tries to tell me that Cletrac HGs and OC3 give full power to both tracks, all the time - which they absolutely DO NOT! Never have, never will- unless you weld the differential spur gears together. As far as the Deeres go - I worked as a Deere mechanic most of my life and am well aquainted with the good and bad ones. Putting parts side by side, the Deeres are absolutely more rugged - but they also tend to be worked harder, thusly break down more, etc. This whole "collector" thing still seems new to me. It wasn't very long ago that MCs, 40s, 420s, 440s, 1010s etc. were user's machines, not collector's - and were being used daily in the woods or quarry. We had a lot of them come into the dealership for repair, and that's saying something since dealer labor rates are always high. Most little Cletracs, by this time, were sitting in a field somewhere with mice living in them. We had a rental business besides selling new and used and worked on plenty of Cases. No little Cletracs, though - they were always "el cheapo" machines and never made it into the dealership. I will add though, that Cletrac was ahead of its time with some of their track designs. I also know several old contractors that specialized in road and pond building 50-60 years ago, and most will tell you that Cletrac had one of the best crawlers on the market. Not the small ones, I'm referring to the bigger machines like the BD. And, off course this all depends what area you live in. My area has always been a Deere area. I can drive 50 miles and hit an IH area. And so on, and so forth. The area also affects how long these machines last. When we were selling Deere 350C crawlers new, they were getting busted to pieces. Final drives, clutch housings, transmission cases, side frames, reversers, etc. Seems like they were all we worked on. But, many we sold had winches on them and were used for bunching 3-5 logs at a time, building roads, and jumping off small cliffs. We also have a lot of hardpan, which is not easy on a crawler. I went to work for a dealer in New Jersey for awhile, and could not believe the difference in how the crawlers held up. Since the soil was all sand and clay with no hard pan, and there was no logging going on, the crawlers virutally lasted forever with nothig cracking or breaking - even the 1010s.
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