Page 432 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

Top/left, clockwise: Hand-scrawled notes for the Holt funnel dozer in the mid-1940s; Holt Funnel Blade attachment on Twin D8 in 1950; King Ranch Twin in transport in 1950; King Ranch Twin w/Holt attachments working in the early 1950s
Still, they were not without their problems. In order to achieve the 36-inch ground clearance, Buster stacked the two bull gears one on top of the other and housed them in a special case. This caused a lot of early final drive failures. “The load on those gears was very severe because these were two tractors hooked together, side-by-side, with double the horsepower,” explains Bill Kammer, who retired from Holt’s Technical Service Dept. in 2011. “And that doubled the stress on the bull gear. It was just too much horsepower for that particular gear. But it was worth it. That machine would clear double what anybody else could.”
As a newly hired shop mechanic in 1956, Kammer spent hours working on those bull gears. “There were little tool marks at the root of the gears from machining. And those caused metal fatigue to where they started shucking teeth. The remedy was to polish those gears to a mirror finish with a quar- ter-inch drill and some sandpaper. I would sit on a chair and polish those tool marks out by the hour. Once we started doing that, those gears would last ten times longer than the originals.”
Ken Martin first encountered the Twins in 1963 at Holt’s Corpus Christi branch. “Those things were
430 | PETERSON: 85 YEARS AND GOING STRONG