You all know that I am a total freak for old equipment. I found this old film made by International Harvester featuring their crawler tractors and more importantly the then-revolutionary Drott four-way bucket. The Drott bucket was developed by the Drott Manufacturing Company out of Wausau, Wisconsin and it changed the way that people in the Earth moving business worked.
The four way bucket allowed for tilting, digging, clamshell action, and more. The clamshell part of the program was super neat because it allowed these machines multiple more feet of upward reach to load trucks, make piles, and more. For land leveling the crawlers could use the clamshell and turn themselves into little scrapers like their much larger IH brethren.
Outside of seeing the tractors in action with the Drott four way bucket the second half of the film shows off the log grapple, the land ripper, and many other uses for the machines. From logging to land leveling, to small jobs around town.
It’s pretty neat to see this old footage for sure and there’s not a BangShifter alive who can’t smile when they see that machine being hauled onto the job site with the old IH truck and on a single axle tilt trailer! I wonder how the brakes were on that thing trying to stop in a hurry! It was probably pretty hairy. They also didn’t seem to like to tie the thing down, either. Yowza!
