Thursday, January 13, 2022

Matt Veerkamp loves Caterpillar brand crawler tractors, and restores them. He found the first Caterpillar brand crawler tractor ever built (1926 Caterpillar Twenty) about 14 years ago, and now, he's restored a 1929 Fifteen, which he found on Craigslist. It's the expo model for the Caterpillar Fifteen, the only one known to exist.



When he got the Fifteen home to the shop, he discovered some other unique things about it. Some of the parts, including the axles and gears, were from Caterpillar’s Model Ten. 

 “The production model Cat Fifteen was different in a lot of ways than this one.” Veerkamp determined he had the prototype or concept Fifteen. 

“It was a bigger version of the Cat 10, which came out the year previous. And I think they ran it, figured out what didn't work and then made a production model after that.”


3 comments:

  1. Cool, you just sent me down a nostalgic search for family photos. My uncle has a Caterpillar 22 from the mid '30's. It looks like a mix between the 15 and 20. I have photos of me at age 3 and my grandfather towing a trailer of firewood with my dad on the trailer. Somewhere there is a recent video of my uncle driving it around the farm. It's almost comical how small it is compared to his modern tractors.

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  2. please provide e-mail address to bajacochimi@gmail.com to see photos of early crawler plate from historic road in northern California--type of machine not known but hope for ID. Thanks, Eric

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