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.
