Caterpillar Thirty in Paradise

By Cecil Hicks
Published on May 17, 2011
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Hank Tavares with his 1925 Caterpillar Thirty.
Hank Tavares with his 1925 Caterpillar Thirty.
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The original Caterpillar logo.
The original Caterpillar logo.
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Sugar cane fields below the West Maui Mountains. Early Caterpillar equipment once worked cane and pineapple fields throughout the Hawaiian Islands.
Sugar cane fields below the West Maui Mountains. Early Caterpillar equipment once worked cane and pineapple fields throughout the Hawaiian Islands.
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Hank’s Caterpillar Thirty has parts from the two companies that gave birth to Caterpillar. Here, a Best crankcase inspection cover.
Hank’s Caterpillar Thirty has parts from the two companies that gave birth to Caterpillar. Here, a Best crankcase inspection cover.
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Hank with his 1943 Farmall Model H.
Hank with his 1943 Farmall Model H.
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The gas tank on Hank’s Cat Thirty shows the lineage of the Caterpillar company.
The gas tank on Hank’s Cat Thirty shows the lineage of the Caterpillar company.
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Hank’s current project: a 1945 Caterpillar D4.
Hank’s current project: a 1945 Caterpillar D4.
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The Cat Thirty, ready – actually, more than ready – for restoration.
The Cat Thirty, ready – actually, more than ready – for restoration.
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Hank’s Thirty as found.
Hank’s Thirty as found.

In 2000, when Hank Tavares first saw an abandoned 1925 Caterpillar Thirty crawler sitting in a weed-covered sugar cane field on Maui in the Hawaiian Islands, he was about the only person who could actually imagine its potential as a restored collectible. His wife, Renee, was solidly in the other camp. “She thought I was totally insane to want to buy it,” he recalls.

When Hank approached the farmer who owned the land about buying the ancient machine, the farmer told him he could have it for free if he’d just haul it away. The farmer’s grandfather had purchased the crawler years earlier to use as a parts donor.

Thus began Hank’s unique venture into the land of antique crawler tractors. Although he’d been a diesel mechanic for 30 years and worked on large equipment for Hawthorne Pacific Corp., a Maui Caterpillar dealer, the restoration of the Caterpillar Thirty would be his most monumental project yet.

For the next four years, Hank poured every spare minute he had into the Caterpillar Thirty, working from his garage, carport and under a backyard tarp at his home in Makawao. The project started innocently enough. “I wanted people to drive by, admire it and stop in and talk about it,” he says.

Mechanical from the start

Hank grew up in Honolulu. As a youth, he and three brothers (two of whom now also work as mechanics) were regulars at local junkyards, where they gathered mechanical treasures that they’d haul home, take apart and rebuild.

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