Finding Grandpa’s Dozer: The Long-Lost 1954 Allis-Chalmers HD-15
John Engstrom bought the dozer back in 1960 to start his business and sold it in 1965. He and his grandson tracked it down before...
machineryasia 
Jeff Engstrom was at an antique equipment show about five years ago when a man approached him with some interesting news about an old dozer.
“I think I found one of your grandpa's old pieces of equipment,” the man said.
“Oh yeah, what makes you think that?”
“Well, it's got his name on it.”
The man began to describe an Allis-Chalmers cable dozer that still had the decals from the excavation business cofounded in 1963 by Engstrom’s grandfather.
Engstrom then spoke with his grandfather, John Engstrom, who was also at the Pioneer Village Antique Power Show in Hastings, Minnesota.
“I was talking with Grandpa later that day, and we're thinking, ‘I think that might be the one. That's the one.’”
The “one” being a 1954 Allis-Chalmers HD-15 dozer that John Engstrom bought used in 1960 to start his excavation business. Allis-Chalmers produced the 14-ton HD-15 between 1951 and 1955. John used the dozer until about 1965 pulling a Wooldridge scraper to move dirt all around southern Minnesota. The company traded it in for a newer dozer, and they never heard about it again – not until the antique show.
Old Iron in His Blood
The Engstrom family would haul bunk houses and grader to their distant jobs with a Caterpillar Sixty, as seen above in this photo from 1929. "They would stay right on the job," Jeff Engstrom says. "The women would come with, and they would take care of the bunk houses and cook meals. It was a whole family affair." The man beside the Sixty is Harry Engstrom, Jeff Engstrom's great-grandfather. The boy on the tracks is his great-uncle.Jeff Engstrom
“They started building roads, and they did it with horses,” Jeff says of his ancestors’ work in their new country.
The Engstrom family on a roadbuilding project in 1929 with Caterpillar Sixty tractor and horses.Jeff Engstrom
Thanks to his grandfather, he also has a love of collecting and restoring vintage construction equipment.
“When I was about 12, 13 years old, I started hanging out with Grandpa,” he says.
John Engstrom was retired by then, after he and his partner sold Husting & Engstrom Inc. in 1997. He would take Jeff out to buy old equipment, particularly Cat cable dozers, as well as the small gas-powered models.
“We’d fix them up, sell them to farmers around the area, and that's how I got into it,” Jeff says. “It got in my blood. I kind of found a love for it.”
John Engstrom was never sentimental about any of the equipment.
“He was really good at buying and selling, and I was not so good at selling,” Jeff says. “I like to collect them more. Everything was always for sale with him. He touched a lot of equipment over the years.”
But there was one old piece he did have feelings about – one he hadn’t seen in over 50 years. It helped him create a successful excavation business that made him a fixture in the community and created lots of jobs.
“We had always talked about it, and he had an old picture of it,” Jeff says. “… That was the beginning of his life and the excavating business.”
Reunited with an Old Friend
At age 87, John Engstrom is reunited with his first dozer after over 50 years – a 1954 Allis-Chalmers HD-15. Check out the video at the end of this story where he walks up on the dozer for the first time.Jeff Engstrom
A contractor had been doing some work for the state Department of Natural Resources and discovered the old dozer out in the middle of the woods.
Upon seeing it, John Engstrom knew it was the HD-15 he had used to get started in business. The one they used when they were running the company from the basement of his home.
“When we walked up on it, there's a dent in the fuel tank, and he remembered how that had happened,” Jeff recalls.
“What was so weird about it,” he adds, “is that it was orange when he had it, the ‘Allis orange.’ Somewhere along the line, it had been painted yellow, but they didn't paint over the decals for whatever reason.
“If they wouldn't have done that, we'd have never found that thing. It was way back out in the woods, kind of where it had given up the ghost.”
Another crazy thing was the phone number on the decals, which were on both sides of the dozer. It was the Engstroms’ home phone number back in the 1960s.
“Well, that number stuck with them,” Jeff says. “They took that number to their next house, then the next house. Then eventually, when they got rid of the home line, that became Grandma's cellphone number.
“So the number that is on that Allis, on that HD-15, is my grandmother's cellphone number to this day.”
Waiting for a Rescue
John and Jeff Engstrom after tracking down the 1954 Allis-Chalmers HD-15 dozer John bought to start an excavation business in 1960.Jeff Engstrom
Despite the condition and without a plan to get it out, Jeff and his grandfather bought the HD-15.
“Like a lot of that stuff that we buy, we figured, ‘Well, you get it bought first, and you figure out how to move it later,’” Jeff recalls.
A year passed, still no plan.
“We figured the brake bands were rusted to the drums, and that's probably what was hanging it up,” Jeff says.
Then on October 5, 2022, John Engstrom passed away. He was 90 years old.
They hadn’t come up with a plan on how to get the dozer out before he died.
Two weeks after the funeral, Jeff got a call from friend and fellow equipment collector Bill Deutsch about looking at an old Cat D9. Along with another friend, they went to check out the dozer.
When they were done, Bill said, ‘Say, where's that HD-15 of your grandpa's?”
“It's an hour south of here,” Jeff said.
“We gotta start coming up with a plan to get that home,” Bill said. “We gotta do something.”
So they jumped back in the truck and headed toward the old dozer's location. But when they arrived at the spot where the HD-15 had been sitting for 30 to 40 years, Jeff was astonished.
Instead of a dozer stuck in the woods, there was a lowboy trailer and several of their friends gathered.
“They had gotten together the day before and took that thing all apart, took the seat off, busted the brake bands off of the drums, and they had gotten it all freed up,” Jeff said.
“They surprised the heck out of me.”
All that was left to do was to push it up onto the trailer and take it home.
“It was pretty wild,” Jeff says. “They had a lowboy sitting there, and they waited for me to get down there to push it out. We pushed it out, and we went home. That was pretty cool.”
Jeff Engstrom and friends load up Grandpa's old HD-15 to bring it home with the help of a 1953 Cat D6 9U dozer.Jeff Engstrom
Sentimental Favorite
Jeff has a collection of about 20 pieces of vintage equipment, including some rare ones, but his grandfather’s HD-15 is his sentimental favorite – even though it doesn’t run and it’s not really a hot collector’s item.
Jeff intends to restore it. It’s sitting outside his shop, and he’s been assembling parts for it here and there in his free time.
“To be able to come home every day and see it sitting outside my shop, it reminds me of what a big project I’ve got on the horizon,” he says. “But it's cool as heck the amount of history there.”
“I always think about that day driving up to it with Grandpa,” he continues.
“He wasn't very sentimental about a whole lot of stuff. He always told me about equipment, ‘You can't fall in love with them. You got to keep ’em moving.’
“But that one was really special for him, and you could tell that. To have that one at home is just really neat.”
Watch John Engstrom at age 87 walk up on the HD-15 for the first time in 2019 – 60 years after he and Jeff located it:
