This is the first post on this winters exciting restoration project. After restoring the Bridgeport Mill last winter, I realized I enjoy having this sort of project to help get through the long cold winters in the New Hampshire. I’m going to try to keep my posts short, contain photos, and actually keep up posting this time around. I’m bad about sharing the projects, like the bridgeport which has been done for a year now and seen several hundred hours of use as an essentially new Milling machine.

I picked up this little guy, with the help of my most awesome neighbor. He has both a bigger truck and an equipement trailer that allowed us to go get this little guy. He’s in sad shape, but also cost less than my lawn mower. I knew he was in rough shape, but as is often the way, you don’t know what that means until you dive into the project.

This is the tensioner on one side. I don’t know what happened, but suspect someone didn’t know the proper way to get the tracks off and used this openeing they made to compress the spring to allow the master link to be removed to get the tracks off.

The real challenge for this rebuild is going to be dealing with this one problem. The shafts are to the best of my ability to determine, involute splined 1.5 ” 23T with a 16/32DP 30 deg pitch to B92.1 specs. I’m not certain how I will deal with this until I see how bad things are in the drivetrain.

If someone stumbles across this page with any information about these dozers, I’d love to know more. I’d be happy to host manuals and or parts catalogs if you have them and are willing to share.

Here’s a shot of the rear drive assembly. The Trackmaster I bought uses a hydraulic motor into a 3 speed transmission (that was trashed, more later), from there it transmits power to this rear drive set up via #60 chain with a 13T sprocket on transmission, and a 38T split sprocket on the driveshaft. You’ll learn more about this in later posts.

The above shows the general state of the machine, filthy, unloved, but largely intact and working. I drove it onto and off the trailer, as well as all about once I got it to the homestead. It’s stuck in gear with transmission issues (wait till you see how bad this was in later posts). Stay tuned for lots more. My little machine weighs in at about 4500lbs according to the badly worn tag on it. I wish the model and other info was still readable. It’s a Trackmaster made by d-Fab Engineering by Fruehauf Corp. Route 202, Montgomeryville, Penna., USA. I can’t find a lot of information about these machines, if you have a better image of this tag please contact me. I would love to have a nice new one made for my machine. I’ll eventually try to use this one to generate new art files to make one. If you share a useful image I’ll make a new machine tag for you as well when I do that.

If someone stumbles across this page with any information about these Dfab Engineering Trackmaster Dozers Crawlers, I’d love to know more. I’d be happy to host manuals and or parts catalogs if you have them and are willing to share. Please leave me a comment or email me at my website name on Gmail (no dot com there). I don’t check often, but I eventually will get back to you to host the information. Thanks!