[AT] Hi-crop Cats?

[Richard Walker]

>but the one that caught my eye was of a couple of "Hi crop" 
>Caterpillar crawlers. One is a Fifteen and the other somewhat 
>smaller. I have never seen anything like that before. The image can 
>be seen at <http://public.fotki.com/SmithFarms/shows/100_3478.html>.

The other Cat is a Twenty-Two.  Neither high-track conversion is 
factory.  Either they were done a long time ago at some local shop 
for fieldwork purposes, or else they are recent conversions by a 
collector who just wanted something different for a conversation starter.

Very interesting, though.  I've only seen one other old gas Cat 
shop-converted to high-track and that was a Twenty-Two which worked 
in a nursery as a tree transplanter.  It would straddle a row of tall 
seedlings and plow loose the roots so the trees could be readied for 
transplanting.

Caterpillar's factory hi-crops spaced the driving sprocket way down 
from the standard position and the front idler and bottom track 
rollers likewise, giving the frame of the crawler much more 
underbelly clearance.  You'll still see a small number of Model Ten 
hi-crops around (Cat manufactured the majority of their hi-crop 
crawlers using Ten's), way less for the Fifteen's and 
Twenty-Two's.  In fact when I was out for the Portland, IN show last 
year there were two hi-crop Tens on display.

Cat stopped building hi-crops in the mid to late '30's.  In fact 
collector value for especially the Fifteen and Twenty-Two hi-crops 
has currently gotten so high that you really have to check carefully 
to make sure the unit is all-original and that a standard Cat hasn't 
been sneakily altered to a hi-crop to increase its value.

>I suppose they might have been common on the West Coast, but I can't 
>even imagine what kind of use they would have around here.

Hi-crops were not all that common here either, Mike.  But some were 
used in the asparagus fields and various other row-crop 
applications.  I hear that others were used in Hawaii for the pineapple fields.


Richard



Richard & Judy Walker
Monrovia, CA

richardwalker @ pobox.com
judywalker @ pobox.com
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