A Two 1010 Tale

[olrobk]

This is one of those weird stories.

I'd been shopping for a track loader to do some heavy duty landscaping for the past year. The reason is that we gave the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree this year after eight years of waiting for them to make up their minds. When they take your big tree, they decimate your entire yard with trucks, cranes and equipment. I figure if they are going to repair it anyway, we might as well make a really big mess and get what we always wanted for a yard by re-grading, filling and planting. I’m a car restorer so I like trucks and earthmoving machinery that’s a little rough around the edges but works hard as opposed to a hundred and fifty thousand dollar Packard. After hearing my adventure stories of shopping for loaders, this older fellow in our car club asked me if I’d like to visit and see what he’s got. Well sure, I say so we drive over to his place and he opens a garage door and here is what appears to me to be a brand new 1010C in a heated garage… for the past twenty years according to him. A beautiful bottom, bright yellow paint and covered with junk, I could see it was a loader however. Then he takes me to another building on his property and opens a door. He says there’s another 1010C in there but all I can see is junk from floor to ceiling. I shine a flashlight into the stuff. I can make out a center idler and some familiar track. I reach in and feel the pins and they feel new. I’m not joking here. You would never have imagined there was a track loader in this picture. It was invisible. He says he wants two thousand for this one because it was used a lot more. He says it made a noise in the transmission when he drove it in there twenty years ago and five thousand for the other, nicer one. I tell him they are both beautiful. In the old car business, I have learned never to jump out of my skin and run around in circles howling, “Wow! I want that!” It’s the kind of behavior that makes people nervous about having you nearby. So I listen, say thank-you and leave. A couple of months later I made an offer of six thousand on an 8000 hour 350B with a four way bucket and a nice bottom but with wet skid plates and running gear. It looks pretty nice for my purposes. The owner accepts it. So I tell him I’ve got one more machine to look at before I give him the money. I call my old friend back. I told him, “I’m going to buy a 350 for six thousand but I’d rather buy your two thousand dollar 1010." He asks me all about it and I tell him. Then he says, “You know? My two machines really have to stay together.” I’m thinking to myself, “Oh-oh, here we go: two old tractors and seven grand.” But he goes on, “So you can have them both for five thousand.”

I get down there to help him and his wife dig them out and he’s already sitting in the seat of the nice one squirting ether down the intake. It starts after ten cranks and sounds fabulous. The other one was a little balkier to start after twenty years but it looks and sounds awfully good too. The nice one has 2500 hours and repainted with a new bottom. The other is 10,720 hours and a new bottom but does have a squawk in the tranny when it’s moving in gear.

I thank you for this website, it’s been an education for me. I’ve learned a lot from you all in a week. =Rob