Nancy McDonnell had been watching her husband, David, and others operating vintage construction equipment at antique machine shows, and she decided it was time she had a turn.
After a local search in the late 1990s, the Germantown, Ohio, couple found a 1956 Caterpillar D4 dozer. It was in rough shape, so they looked at another D4 of the same era. It also had problems.
“And my husband said, ‘You know, everything that’s good on this one is bad on the other one, and everything that’s bad on this one is good on the other one,’” Nancy recalls. “So we ended up buying both of them and putting them together.”
And that’s how she got her first piece of construction equipment.
“At that point, I’d never been on one before,” she says. “So I had no idea what this was going to be like to operate.”
The couple spent most evenings after work for several weeks restoring the 1956 D4 while using parts from the other one. It was also the first time she had worked on construction equipment.
One memory stands out of replacing the grousers. David wanted to keep the chains. He hoisted the tracks with a backhoe and gave Nancy a blow torch.
