I found this in someones front yard near where I'm working. I reckon its old, yet age is relative!!! I'd like to know more about it if anyone knows... Cheers!:drinkup
Its sure does look old and I like would like to know as well what it is exactly Great pics and thanks for sharing them... Is that a Cat?
It looks like an old Drott "CruzAir" which Case was a part of if I am not mistaken.It would be interesting to find out some history on it.They were quite popular back in the day.Ron G
I believe it is a Drott 30 CruzAir. The first dealer I worked for sold those. Washington State and the counties had a mess of them. We would get a couple of them a year to do total rebuilds on. The Drott family invented the things and the model units went from these to the Drott 80 in cruzair models. They had tracked machines as I recall in model 35 and 50. Some of the tracked models had the tilting houses. They were inexpensive to purchase and mechanically and hydraulically very simple. They did need lots of repair over time because they were kind of lightly built. Drott also made rough terrain cranes for the same carriers. Those cranes were probably the death of the company because of bad operators. The Drott company was sued over some crane accidents which set the precedent for most all manufacture liability. From what I heard at the time the courts decided that the manufacturer was supposed to build the unit so that the operator couldn't hurt anyone, so Drott was apparently at fault for someone elses stupid operators. At any rate the company and assets were sold to Case around 1980 and the company I worked for lost the dealership for them. At the same time the timber industry went bust and the dealership layed off half of the mechanics. That's another story for another time. Case kept the line going for a few more years but never did anymore development or improvements to the basic designs. About the only thing Case did was put their engine in the crawler units instead of the Detroits.
i'm quite sure it's a drott 40 crusss..last letter of alphabet's not workin on keyboard here...air......with a "y" or yumbo boom. we primarily for ditch cleaning, etc...the y boom was not very good for trenching, or setting pipe/manholes.
Drott. Hi, BoomRider. That'll do for an older machine, as much because of its 'unusuality' as for its age. The Drott company made the original Skid-Shovel buckets and loader kits, mostly for International crawlers. As I understand it, these were the ORIGINAL 4-in-1 buckets and better than a LOT that have been made by others since too. Thanks for sharing. Happy holidays.