“I tried to haggle with him on the price,” Stutsman says. “Man, I’ve got to get that thing restored,” Stutsman said to himself. Recently he was making his usual monthly online search for vintage equipment when he typed in “John Deere 15 for sale.” An owner in Maine had one he was willing to part with. “According to my dad and mom, when I saw that little mini machine when I was 3 years old, I wouldn't stop crying, screaming and throwing a tantrum until I got to sit in it,” he says.Ī veteran operator at 3 years old: Shay Stutsman in a 1987 Deere 15 mini excavator in 1987. They brought it to his grandfather to give it a try at the excavation company. “In the late 80s, mini excavators were very rare, kind of a new thing, not really many people had them,” he says. Today he is the third-generation president of the company.īack in 1987, when Stutsman was 3, a part of the family owned a John Deere dealership selling mostly farm tractors when a Deere 15 mini excavator arrived at the lot. As a child, Stutsman would go to work with his father and ride in the equipment. His grandfather cofounded the family excavation company, Stutsman-Gerbaz Earthmoving, in 1960 in Aspen, Colorado. “I was pretty much born in a piece of heavy equipment and just kept bugging everybody to play on one,” says Stutsman.
Shay and Carlie on their wedding day with the newly restored D6. “It was something very rare and unique – not a lot of people can say they did it.” “We drove around Aspen, made a few stops, had a couple of drinks here and there, and then went back to our reception.”Īt first, he wasn’t sure how well his bride-to-be would react to using a tractor instead of a fancier, more traditional ride. “We actually had a hay trailer that was towed behind, and so the whole wedding party pulled away from the church on this nice D6 tractor,” he says. The restoration was so impressive Stutsman and his fiancée decided to use the D6 in their wedding, just weeks after it arrived at their home in Aspen, Colorado. It runs on a 3-cylinder diesel engine and is started with a gasoline pony motor. It had previously been introduced in 1935 as the RD6, but the “R” was later dropped.
This particular D6 model was produced by Caterpillar from 1937 to 1941.
1967 CAT D6 MANUAL GENERATOR
Along with rebuilding the cab, work included getting it running, fixing leaks, fixing the generator and lights, and new seat. Shay StutsmanAntique Crawler Parts & Restoration finished the restoration about a year later, on August 26, 2021. The former owner of the D6 penciled in service notes, which have been preserved. “It would have been a shame to strip it and paint it and get rid of these handwritten service dates and notes.” The markings were on the dash and air cleaner showing when it had been maintained while used as a wheatland tractor in northern Montana. “What's so cool about this tractor is that there were a lot of pencil-drawn marks from when the machine was actually serviced,” he says. Stutsman prefers his equipment to be shiny and new looking, but some markings on the D6 changed his mind for this particular project. The cab was then rebuilt one piece at a time to the exact specs of the tractor. “We actually had a cabinet company in Wyoming take the old cab, and they basically took it apart piece by piece and remeasured and re-cut each piece of wood,” he says. Stutsman bought it and had it sent to Wyoming for restoration by Antique Crawler Parts & Restoration. Shay StutsmanThe 1940 D6 was being sold online out of Montana in 2020. Here's a shot of the 1940 D6 before restoration. And though he focuses on Caterpillar equipment, he made an exception for a rare 1987 John Deere 15 mini excavator, the same model that was the first piece of construction equipment he operated – when he was 3 years old. That desire led him to a 1940 Cat D6 with a rare wooden cab that he has had beautifully restored. “So as I've started my process of collecting more tractors, the goal is to go after more unique, much more rare antique tractors.” “As I started collecting more pieces of Caterpillar old antique tractors, I learned that there is really not a lot of significance with that particular model there were a lot of D4s from that era made,” he says. The excitement of adding that antique crawler tractor increased his desire for vintage equipment, but he also decided to focus more on the rare and hard-to-find pieces. His first find was in 2016 when he came across a 1949 Cat D4 in Missouri on a used-tractor sales website. Shay Stutsman is relatively new to collecting antique construction equipment, but in a short time he has acquired and had restored some rare specimens.
0 kommentar(er)
