Bobcat Media Day: Greenhorn Gear-boy Gets a Clue

Reader Contribution by Caleb Regan and Managing Editor
Published on June 2, 2010
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I felt like a kid today, and that’s always such a great feeling. Coming to the Bobcat Atlanta Media Event in 2010, I didn’t know what to expect. I sort of expected to feel overwhelmed and ignorant – even more than usual. I thought, sure, I’d do fine on a 1962 Allis Chalmers, or Farmall H from 1941 (the tractors I grew up around on our southeast Kansas farm). Then, I got on the Bobcat CT450 tractor – with a semi-synchronized gear transmission (SST) – with a rear-attached soil conditioner, set the speed, and let the machine do the work. I was fascinated by that tractor. Heck, throwing out all those terms makes me feel like Hank Will.

In the coming days I’ll post some video of Lance Mathern, general manager of Bobcat utility products, talking about that tractor, the SST system, and Bobcat’s ever-increasing product diversity. Bobcat rolled out the SST option for its CT335, CT445 and CT450 compact tractors in January.

But a 5-ton excavator with all the gadgets and levers?! I’d never been on one. The only time I’d really ever sniffed running a boom, I was running from it, as an incompetent concrete foreman was dropping basement wall forms on the jobsite.

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