12/23/2023 0 Comments Caterpillar dozer model history![]() ![]() Transition tractorĪs found, Hank’s Thirty promised to be a challenge. One – a 1925 Cat Thirty – caught Hank’s eye. As the years passed, many pieces were abandoned and forgotten. When the corporate farms upgraded, the used equipment was sold to small farmers. Decades ago, new crawlers were routinely purchased from California Caterpillar dealers to work the islands’ sugar cane and pineapple fields run by large corporations. Years later, when he became interested in antique tractors, Hank began looking around the island for prospects. The manager was so impressed by Hank’s knowledge of engines that he offered him a job. A few months later, while working on a Cummings engine with a county mechanic, he contacted a local Cummings dealership, looking for a service manual for the engine. As a youth, he and three brothers (two of whom now also work as mechanics) were regulars at local junkyards, where they gathered mechanical treasures that they’d haul home, take apart and rebuild.įollowing graduation from high school, Hank enrolled in a mechanical apprenticeship program offered through the county. “I wanted people to drive by, admire it and stop in and talk about it,” he says. Although he’d been a diesel mechanic for 30 years and worked on large equipment for Hawthorne Pacific Corp., a Maui Caterpillar dealer, the restoration of the Caterpillar Thirty would be his most monumental project yet.įor the next four years, Hank poured every spare minute he had into the Caterpillar Thirty, working from his garage, carport and under a backyard tarp at his home in Makawao. Thus began Hank’s unique venture into the land of antique crawler tractors. ![]() The farmer’s grandfather had purchased the crawler years earlier to use as a parts donor. ![]() When Hank approached the farmer who owned the land about buying the ancient machine, the farmer told him he could have it for free if he’d just haul it away. “She thought I was totally insane to want to buy it,” he recalls. His wife, Renee, was solidly in the other camp. In 2000, when Hank Tavares first saw an abandoned 1925 Caterpillar Thirty crawler sitting in a weed-covered sugar cane field on Maui in the Hawaiian Islands, he was about the only person who could actually imagine its potential as a restored collectible. ![]()
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