KING OF OBSOLETE HAS ARRIVED, CLETRACS ON THE CAT TRAINS

[King of Obsolete]

hello, i have been stopping for the last year and final decided to post. the cletracs were used in the winter freighting in the great white north. i have some picture to share but how do you post them here?
if you go to my website

www.kingofobsolete.ca

and check the pictures of the cletrac being salvaged in 90 feet of water thru the ice.

thansk
KoO

[Blake Malkamaki]

To post a picture, you must link to one that is on a server somewhere. Simple use the img and /img tags at the beginning and end of the url for the picture. They are at the top of this window.

Please make sure the picture will fit comfortably on the screen and not so wide it makes everyone scroll out for acres. 600 or 800 pixels is probably good.

Let me know if you need help.

Welcome aboard!

Blake

[King of Obsolete]

my attempt at posting a picture.

thansk


ok a little small but it was of the most known pictures of the cat trains heading to red lake ontario. you see it on all the history stories and such.

will work on the size.

edit to bigger size

thansk

[King of Obsolete]

another one

thansk


edit for bigger picture

[Philngruvy]

Hey King, I went to your site.  What a hoot!!!!!!!  The ramp boat you made out of the steel tanks is awesome. I like to see innovative projects. Keep up the good work.
Ron

[King of Obsolete]

thansk ron, what i'm doing is trying to use my website to show people our differnet way of life. one of the biggest kee secrets is the cat train and the cats that pulled the sleighs. everyone thinks it was just caterpillar tractors used, but alot of cletrac and IH cats were used.

thansk

more pictures to come

[King of Obsolete]

here we go, i enjoy this picture of the cats on main street, cat trains were more popular then car back then.

thansk

[Blake Malkamaki]

My Uncle John used to pull sleds of logs like this with a 10-ton Holt in upper Wisconsin or Minnesota.

Before that they used steam Lombard Log Haulers. He said the Lombards would pull much more.

Blake

[King of Obsolete]

wait here, i'll go and get someone who knows more then i do on the lombards.

thansk

did i do good on the pictures??

[Blake Malkamaki]

Yea, the pictures are fine. You can go a little bigger if you want to.

I'm gonna move this topic to a better place since it is not precisely related to the models of Cletracs in this forum.

Blake

[ferrology]

The easiest way to tell the Lombard, built in Waterville, ME (which in all the arguement over who invented what, can say they are the first to build more than a prototype, they built, sold and serviced a commercially viable crawler long before Holt bought the Hornsby track steer patents and went on to become the "inventor" of the crawler tractor) from the Pheonix, Eau Claire, WI (built under license from Lombard) is that the Lombard has a flat steering wheel on front, where the Pheonix has one tipped forward at about a 45 degree angle, and Pheonix built a much classier wood cab on the back. Lombard did experiment with the vertical cylinder placement and what I'm told by people in Maine is that Lombard shipped one like this to the people who later founded Pheonix, and that Holt inspected this machine before building his own crawler. (They had a big lawsuit going at one point). There seems to be more Pheonix (5?) than Lombard steamers around but a few fanatical collectors are scouring the woods and fabricating parts to change that, there are probably 5 gas Lombards and I don't know if Pheonix ever built more than one gas powered prototype. Linn was sometimes an employee of Lombard, and an issue over propriertorship of patent rights caused him to leave Maine and later establish a factory here in a isolated little Upstate NY town.
      But I do own a Cletrac EG thanks to Dana Carrara, and I have visited this site before becoming a member because I've been curious about using the Model A transmission and power unit (as mine has none). I also run across Cletrac mentions in my research as I go through old town records searching for Linn info. so will share what little Cletrac info. I have run across as time allows. I believe John R. Tinklepaugh, down in Livingston Center/Germantown, NY  (a Good Roads/Galion grader then Sargent plow as well as Oshkosh/Ross distributor, now its Navistar-Ben Funk Inc.) was the dealer in the east part of the state, and a man named Van Namee out of Horseheads, NY the west part).

[King of Obsolete]

thansk for joining us ferrology, can you post a picture of that cletrac in the logging camp. i think you posted it over at the cat BB about a year ago.

thansk

[King of Obsolete]

here we go ferrology, i used the magic of the mouse and here we go with your picture.

thansk

[ferrology]

Machine in front is the C-series Linn C-5, 5 ton capacity, front wheel drive all the while, track drive optional, wheeled rear axle that lowered to raise the tracks so it could run on the highway like a truck, the Hercules YXC3 474 displ. engine would interchange with the Cletrac, except is set up for 2400 rpm with aluminum pistons. It has the "ear" engine mounts on the flywheel housing and updraft carb. Supposedly Cletrac was all this outfit used (besides Linn to carry the logs out to the roadside). In otherwords the Cletrac was working like a horse, snaking the logs down to the loader. There actually are/were quite a few Cletracs up in the Lowville-Lyons Falls area of NY, but in recent years they have been cleaning out a lot of junkyards where most the scavenged remains I knew of sat. Now I have to dig out the other Cletrac pic.

[King of Obsolete]

here is where i'm getting the pictures from, very nice book and it has airplanes and boats that were used to haul freight. i like the cover picture, one tough fellow on the front page.



thansk