Master Sargent Snowplow (Video)

In 1985, when Dick Moody got a lead on a 1930 Cletrac K20, plowing snow was the last thing on his mind. But old iron has a funny way of calling the shots. “I didn’t know what a Cletrac was,” he says, “but I had always wanted a crawler, and being young – in my early 40s, and ‘can do anything’ – I went to look at it. It did look pretty sad, very rusty with no paint showing, no tin, gas tank badly dented, engine stuck, no magneto and no carburetor. Still, being young and stupid, I bought it for $450.”

Back when Dick was restoring the Cletrac, Wayne Fisher – the man who’d loaned him the tin work – asked if he wanted an old wooden snow plow that had been used with a Cletrac Model K20 years before. Left sitting behind Wayne’s barn for years, the plow – a Sargent built in Bangor, Maine – was in bad shape. “Still being young and foolish,” Dick says, “I drug it home.”

Dick didn’t exactly rush forward with restoration. “I piled the pieces behind my barn,” he says, “where they continued to rot for another 25 years.” In 2012, his wife asked him to move the remnants and Dick gave the plow a second look. “I thought it would be a good little winter project,” he says. He and his wife literally dug the plow out of the ground; she even used a metal detector to find parts. Dick spent a lot of time studying what remained. “First I had to figure out how it was supposed to work,” he says.

He laid the pieces out in his garage but none of it made sense. He tried to find information online but had little success. He found an advertisement for a Sargent snow plow for Cletrac 12s and 20s with a line drawing and dimensions. “But I still didn’t know how the lift mechanism worked, how the plow was attached to the tractor or how the two wings were attached and lifted,” he says, “things I thought were sort of important.” FC

Find out how Dick Moody solved the puzzle for the snowplow in the below video and read the full story in: Master Sargent Snowplow: Tackles Snowdrifts With Ease.