Just when I thought I had a point to argue about working on a heavy vehicle after owning that wretched sled that was the Cadillac limo, I had to go and look up the weight of a Big Bud 525/50 tractor: up to 52,000 pounds. You could pick fourteen of any of the vehicles I’ve ever owned in my lifetime so far and you might get to that same weight if you put them together. Jackstands? Do they even make jackstands that heavy-duty? I don’t know…maybe one of you trucker types can teach me something I don’t know. But either way, taking apart one of these beefy Montana-built tractors is one thing…putting everything back together is another. The teardown is the easy part, everybody knows that, but the Welkers have had the Big Bud painted and it’s time to finish the restoration up and put the tractor back together, hopefully in time for Spring planting. It would be cool to have a freshened up four-wheeled monster roaming the wide-open fields, doing the work it’s designed to do while looking as good as the day it rolled out of the factory, wouldn’t it?
