It sounds weird to say but as we have seen cars evolve from the 1940s through today, many of the same things that have happened in cars have happened with heavy equipment. This 1940s Allis-Chalmers HD5 Crawler Tractor Sales Video does a good job of illustrating that. The stuff today is more complex, outside of the headlights, this tractor has nothing electrical. Stuff today is largely safer, as cool as the open cab operator position is here if one of these rolls over, the operator is doomed. Stuff today has swelled up in size as well. Now, yes there are perhaps more options to pick from in terms of what size you need your machine to be, but the HD5 represented kind of the largest swath of equipment most people needed. Not too big and not too small.
As all these old films are want to do, we see the machine doing a load of different jobs. From acting as a log skidder in the mountains to doing snow work in the city, light construction, moving coal, effectively everything that the marketing department could dream up.
I’d like to have one of these bad boys to fire up and play around with. Between the Detroit Diesel power and the bucket to scoop stuff with, I’d have a blast.
