Caterpillar D10 memories

by Nick Drew | Thu 03 Jul 2014

Caterpillar D10 memories

There has been a fair bit of chat recently on the Facebook pages about the mighty Cat D10. So I figured it was time we had a little blog on what was a revolutionary machine.

The Cat D10 first broke cover in 1977, when Caterpillar revealed its first High-Drive tractor to the world. But its development can be traced much further back, in fact back as far as 1969 engineers had been working on the concept and eventually came up with a prototype model in 1973. So in 1977, the 700hp monster machine was shown to an eager audience of dealers at Caterpillar’s Peoria facility in Illinois. This photo courtesy of Darren Howard from Queensland in Australia shows the dealers taking their first look around the machine in Peoria.

Of course the idea behind it all was to keep the sprocket and drive components up out of the mud, but like all new ideas, initially most thought it was crazy and would never catch on, considering it to be a massive gamble by the American giant. Well how wrong they were, it paid off big time, eventually being rolled out to all other dozer sizes in the Caterpillar range. In this grainy photo we see a young 11 year old Darren Howard getting some “Stick Time” in one of the 88 tonne giants, this model being one of the first units to arrive in Queensland.

Here is a great clip of a period Cat D10 at work, probably one of close to a 1,000 examples of the first D10’s that were sold to market by dealers around the world. [youtube width="725" height="344"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaQRgpIVBvY[/youtube] We thank Darren Howard for the photos supplied for this Digger Man Blog.

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