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Found my '63 443's sister

Broken Grouser

Broken Grouser

Member
I was surfing the web the other night and stumbled upon a picture of a 443 Tucker taken at the Virginia Museum of Transportation. My '63 has the same hood, which is a rare fiberglass construction with the Tucker emblem formed into the glass at the nose of the hood. I'm pretty sure these cats are the same year and must have come out of Medford at the same time.

About the only difference I can see is my cat originally had mud and snow tracks on it so it has the dual track tension adjusters on the pontoons. I should contact the museum and see if they can share the serial number off
of their cat.

The first cat is at the museum and the second is ours at Camp Hale here in Colorado.
 

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Thanks for the comment PB - the tracks on that museum cat look like their pretty solid yet too. I wonder if they got any rollers laying around in a bucket..........:shifty:
 
What do mud & snow tracks look like? All the Tucker bars that I've come across have been pretty similar (except for width). I've seen some that had a round tube instead of the triangular cross piece. Those were on a scrapped out machine in a junk yard in Grandby years ago. Those pontoons had no track tensioners at all.
 
mtncrawler - I'll dig out my scanner tomorrow and post a picture from an old Tucker brochure.

The grousers were a solid semi-flat profile that were interlinked together by the actual grouser, similar to a large steel roll up commercial garage door and used the same roller bearings as standard tracks. Tucker would put hard rubber blocks onto the face of every few grousers so they could operate on hard surfaces for short distances (an option?). The grousers covered the entire surface of the pontoon top and bottom. The pontoons were identical to the standard tracks. They fabricated a sprocket with a modified tooth pattern to work with grousers.

From the condition of the grousers on my '63 before I put the standard grousers from a parts cat, I could see that they had issues from lots of metal on metal (as we know any steel tracked Tucker had this problem - but these were even more so) contact and limitations on tension adjustment - especially after the adjusters at the end of the pontoons had been maxed out.

I'm not sure how long Tucker produced these tracks. I know they ran them on 400 series and 222 Kittens - not sure about 500 series.
 
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