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The first one in service was about
in 1965
About 1965 or '66
I think I first came up with the idea.
Why not a swamp buggy? It's like you see out there.
It has an amphibious undercarriage.
It floats across canals. It floats across rivers. It'll float across a lake.
It's a machine that I built
that had a pontoon on each side
and it had track over pontoon.
And of course you could...
It's kind of hard to explain. You just have to see a picture of it or see it.
What I've done, I built two. One to pull the timber.
And if I break down,
I have to get it out.
There's not enough water in the swamps to float it out.
So you have to pull it out.
But I've never broke down.
Not one time.
I put them all together.
I know how to weld, burn, fabricate.
That's what you need to do.
That's what I do, because I got all the equipment for it. I don't have to hire to weld or hire this or hire that.
You can get something done
because I don't have plans.
I don't build nothing with plans.
I don't build nothing
that I can look at and see and build it like.
I design it myself. And then once
I got it working in my mind, might take three months,
but if it works in my mind, I just get the material
and go to work and put it together. That's how I built the buggy. And if you look at it,
you'll see a lot of work on it.
Like the fellow say, you don't abracadabra and get everything done.
But you think your road's too hard. It goes a lot faster
if you know the material you need.
The width of it. The length of it. And how you going to
fabricate them rods, to cause that clutch, you see.
On that machine, it's not hydraulics. I built two of them,
all hydraulics, but I didn't
like hydraulics.
If you get in the swamp,
you can't see where a bush or a little tree is going to
tear the hoses off.
You can't watch all that
and if you tear it off,
then you're going to pollute the swamp.
And you can't do that.
I was tickled to death
To look back there and this machine
pulling a tree
that's way heavier than this thing.
But I had to learn just where to pull it, the weight.
You got to keep the weight of the tree on the swamp bed.
And you got to have that little crown down.
But, if it doesn't have a crown,
you bring it up maybe a foot or so closer to
where you'll have
a little more weight here
...more weight there than you got here.
Because those trees are heavy and big.