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Joe - Congrats on finding that crawler for the very best price of all...FREE. I can give you just a bit of perspective, being that I own an old piece of IH iron like that. I have a '69 IH150 loader (the little brother to the machine you're looking at) with a 4-1 bucket. I can't tell you how fantastic this machine has been for me since I bought it last winter. I've used it for logging, clearing, and now Im building my driveway with it...LOTS of digging and grading. It just plain rocks, I keep wondering if all the hard work will break it, but it just keeps on going. Here's a pic of it: 
But I would seriously ask myself if I had enough work to get your money out of this machine before taking it. That's a BIG machine and it may very well gobble some SERIOUS money to get it in good running order again (as well as a lot of hard, greasy dirty work). If you have some big jobs to take care of, and/or you think you can line up some side work to recoup your investment, then it may very well be worth it. On the other hand, if you just love crawlers and have some disposable income, I know several men who have dumped $30k-$60k into a boat or a custom Harley, and you can't dig a basement with either one of those. So having a crawler for fun aint such a bad idea in my book either. I can say that my machine amazes me with what it will do, I can only imagine what a 250 would get done. And don't underestimate the importance of the 4-1 bucket, it is fantastic! It's awesome for dozing, grading, spreading fill, grabbing logs and stumps and moving them around and just plain digging and scooping. Sounds like you have a pretty good foundation machine there, so if you really have a serious use for a big machine like that then you may want to scoop it up. But I would anticipate spending $5k-$10k and a bunch of hours on it to get it going well. If you the time, place and money to do it, then go for it!
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