millie, my NW 25 crane

Years ago, I spotted the pumpkin orange color while driving to the airport in Wenatchee, WA. Sure enough, it was a Northwest Engineering crane, a NW 25 model with crawler tracks.

I never got serious about bringing it home until now. Now being the day that I paid the bill from the crane company for offloading the seam mule from the lowboy trailer. 1500 dollars to lift it one ft in the air and then lower it four ft after the trailer drove out from under.

So, I enquired. "You can have it for nothing. Take the damn thing outta there." was what the owner said when I reached him by phone. Worked for me. I was underneath the belly of the thing wrestling with a stuck bolt and wiping grease off my cheek when I heard someone. "So, you're going to try to get this thing started, too, huh?" I shimmied on out. Turns out that a number of guys had tried to get this crane running. "Hasn't run since the day they parked it in 1973." Turns out that even then they had to pull it off the lowboy with a dozer. I began wondering what I've gotten myself into here. I'm not looking for another project of tired iron--I'm looking for a working crane to lift sea mule sections. Three months and a dozen trips to Wenatchee later, I've got this crane all loosened up, lubed up, tuned up and able to load itself on a truck for the ride back home.

It seems that somethings can just be sleeping, waiting for the right person, with the right touch to wake them up.

first date with the sea mule

She was sitting just West of Bingen, WA. Highway 14 runs the tight passage between basalt bluff above and the Columbia river surging past below. The boat had been grabbed from bankruptcy proceedings across the river in Hood River, Oregon. And here it sits up on a precarious perch of stacked pallets, waiting, while the prices listed in the paper and ebay kept going down and down. 15,000 then 12,000 okay...10,000 and finally 5,000.

I had been working in Vancouver and came back thru this way--"Just to stop and see," I told myself. Not hard to find, she was sitting in the parking lot of a shut-down lumber mill.

I climbed up top, swung open a hatch and climbed down inside one of the front hull sections.

This is looking forward towards the bow on the portside front sections, which are 12 ft long, 6' wide and 7' high. I liked what I saw

It's the aft hull sections that cemented our relationship. The smell of gear lube and massive engines greeted me in the dim light. These engines have double Carter carbs on each and transmissions.

And here's the view aft. Those propellors are 54" in diameter.