Subject: A “crated tractor” adventure – Part I

Hal Manelman, the founder and guru of COTA, is providing a marvelous service for tractor guys like me. I’m a guy with lots of work to get done on my hilly 60 acres of timber in eastern Oregon, but I have a rather small budget. I need a tractor, but I’ve never owned one. More specifically, I need a crawler tractor because wheel tractors tip over too easily on these hills. Crawler tractors are inherently more expensive than wheel tractors, so I have to figure ways to cut costs. As it turns out, this forum has a number of regular contributors who have been very helpful. I’m thinking of Mike Stuart of Maverick Tractors, JohnS of John’s Tractor web page, Schmalts a mechanic par excellence, and Graham of Bolton Power Equipment. There are others but these are the ones whose contributions have been most useful to me. My sincere thanks to Hal and to all of you in this forum!

Since I’ve taken a different path than most, I thought I’d offer a few of my experiences for the benefit of others who may be so inclined. What’s different is that I ended up buying a crated crawler-type tractor that I picked up from the Port of Portland (Oregon) right after it had been unloaded from the good ship Jing Po He on March 4, 2002. My idea was to pull a rented tilt-bed trailer behind my Ford F250 to Portland, pick up the crawler and frame-mounted backhoe, and get back to Mt. Vernon in one day (600 mile round trip). It was an adventure.

A little background: Ocean freight is cheap compared to road freight. The importer told me that Ocean freight charges are figured by volume not weight. My stuff was figured at 10.53 cubic meters (about 372 cu. ft.) to cost $260 to travel 6000 miles. Road freight, on the other hand, is $1.75 to $2/mile, or $600 to travel 300 miles. Customs duties and most dock charges are pro-rated over the cost of the equipment … all except for the warehouse’s “load-out” charge. It’s also figured on volume, which amounted to $69 for my stuff. That’s the only dock/warehouse charge I had to pay. Storage charges don’t accrue until after three working days. After that, storage costs estimated at approximately $100/day apply (it varies).

The terminal warehouses don’t do much “customer pickup” business. They’re set up to load 18-wheeler flatbeds using big forklifts. Utility flatbeds like I rented has wheel wells which is a bit more if a problem to load. A crane would have been ideal. No matter. We used lift trucks ... lots of lift trucks. There were two things to load, the crawler at 5500 lbs, and the backhoe at 1100 lbs. Both are mounted on steel frames (no container crate). The base of the crawler steel frame actually had little rollers, but they were crosswise for our purposes. They were installed to make it easy for a backhoe to come in from the side to lift it up for positioning in the center of an 18-wheeler flatbed. But again we couldn't do that because of utility trailer's wheel wells. So we had to load it from the back and then push it forward (no rolling) as far as possible, which wasn't near far enough. We wound up with lots of weight back of the trailer axels to lift up the rear end of the truck. The forks of the lift truck just weren't long enough to push it any further, so we got a chain and had two lift trucks to come in on each side of the trailer just forward of the crawler to use the forks ability to shift sideways to gradually move the crawler just forward of the wheels. Then we loaded the backhoe on the back. We had to stand it up and chain and rope it to the crawler and to the trailer tie downs. So yeah ... it wasn't straightforward, but we ended up with almost perfect balance with maybe 10% of the weight on the trailer tongue. It rode great all the way back.

Coming out of Portland down HiWy 84, in a driving wind and rain storm, we turned south at Biggs Junction and then took a state road east to Wasco, Condon, Fossil and Spray to finally intersect HiWy 26 just west of Dayville. But it was slow. That was the heaviest single load I've ever hauled with the truck. Even with that big 460 engine I had to shift down to 3rd (two gear ranges) to get up the hills, and my gas mileage dropped to the 7 - 8 mpg range.

Unloading the next morning was fun too. If I owned the trailer, I think I would have taken the time to fill the tractor with fluids and drive it off, but I had to get the trailer back to avoid more rental charges.

Since the backhoe is an unstable piece of equipment, I decided to install it on the back of the crawler first. Remember this is just a little less than 1100 lbs so you can't just pick it up. But I got out my trusty A-frame ladder and using a 2x4 across the top two rungs I used a come-along to lift it in place. Then using a floor jack under the bucket, I jacked it level and bolted it on. Then all I had to do was to get the combo (now weighing 6600+ lbs) off the trailer. That’s why I rented a tilt trailer. I put the tractor in neutral, released the bed and used a floor jack to lift the bed's front end to provide a gentle incline to the ground. Oh yeah, I also had the trailer positioned in back of the Motorhome. I chained the crawler to the Motorhome's trailer hitch, and, using a come-along, pulled the crawler off the frame and slowly down the trailer bed (tracks don't roll as easy as rubber wheels). Once it got to the bottom, half the tractor was still on the trailer, so I tried to drive the truck ahead to pull the trailer out from underneath the crawler. Didn’t work … just spun the wheels even in 4-wheel drive. So I used chains, jacks and come-along's to get the tractor a little further to where I could finally pull the trailer free. Yeah, it wasn't easy. But I didn't break nothin’ so it all worked as planned.

Now comes the assembly which mostly involves attaching the 6-way blade. No, there aren’t any "directions;" and yes, much of the documentation is in Chinese (I understand most of the wheel tractor manuals are pretty good). But they do provide a tool kit and lots of spare parts. Stuff like valves, piston rings, head gaskets, filters and lots of seals for rebuilding the hydraulics. I'm told China builds more tractors and diesel engines than any other nation by far. Most go to the third world who, like me, are fairly self-sufficient and don't have parts stores around every corner. So they build these things to be easy to maintain and operate. For example, they don’t worry a whole lot about oil specs. They pretty much use only one kind of oil for everything. Ol' standard 30W for the engine, hydraulics and gear drives. Regarding fuel, these engines run on just about any kind of oil that flows, from vegetable oil from the kitchen to paraffin from the lanterns. They use all grades of diesel including jet fuel. The main requirement is to filter out the sand and water ... and they might adjust the injectors to get the right spray pattern for the particular oil used, which is an interesting process. Where our shops might have a $100,000 piece of equipment to measure just the right injector pressures for light diesel oil, they just eyeball the spray pattern against a piece of cardboard. Interesting, eh?

Well, that’s it for Part I. I gotta go out of town for awhile so won’t get to the actual assembly for awhile. Look for Part II in a couple weeks. Oh yeah, my wife tells me to mention that this sort of operation may not be for everyone. She has to remind me every once in awhile that I’m a little weird … else I forget.