Build Barricades, Granby, Colorado! The Killdozer Makes a WhistlinDiesel Comeback of Sorts

WhistlinDiesel is the social media persona of Cody Detwiler, a Texan with a natural talent for creating highly acclaimed videos in which he destroys, demolishes, crashes, arsons, explodes, obliterates, or annihilates various machines, buildings, and landscapes on and around his property. His latest feat centers around one of the most infamous bulldozers in America: the Killdozer Komatsu D355A.

In short, the YouTuber purchased one ice of said equipment from a man in Montana and went to pick it up. Cody Detwiler has prior experience in acquiring and shipping overweight cargo, so the trailering to an unnamed town in Colorado should pose much of a challenge. Remember, he went to England to buy a decommissioned main battle tank, shipped it to the U.S., and turned it into a remote-controlled military-grade wrecker.

The giant piece of Komatsu heavy machinery sat in the frozen forests of Montana since last fall, and it took some effort to get it up and running. The YouTuber – famous for his shenanigans with all things automotive – had to fire it up to get it fired up. That’s not a logic-fracturing verbiage but the actual method applied to get the engine to warm up.

Detwiler started a campfire under his newly-acquired toy to heat the oil and coolant. But, since the engine is not exactly a soccer mom van average powerplant, the operation lasted for several hours, from the dead of night till well after dawn.

Eventually, the vlogging mechanics discovered that the air filter intake was capped by a solid lid of twigs and ice, preventing the Godzillian diesel engine from starting. At 5°F (negative 15°C), the 1,175 cubic-inch inline six takes a little while to get itself together. That’s 19,260 CCs (19.26 liters) of Diesel engine, two meters long (6ft6in), 1.3 meters wide (4ft2in), and 2.68 tons heavy, moving a 54-ton tracked ogre like it’s a shoebox.

As we can see in the first video, the unstoppable steel fortress has zero problems plowing through two feet (some 600 mm) of solid-frozen dirt with its oversized U-blade and rear rippers. The blade alone (184 inches / 4,680 mm long and 73.8 inches / 1,874 mm tall) adds 19,330 lbs (8.77 tons) to the vehicle's dry weight of 38.3 tons. The difference to 54 tons sits at the back of the big Komatsu – the two-shank ripper alone tips the scale at 15.830 lbs (7.18 tons).

The turbocharged iron behemoth makes 410 hp (416 PS) and 1,273 lb-ft (1,726 Nm) and uses an eight-speed gearbox with a torque converter (four speeds forward, four in reverse). Just for the sake of wrenching, note that the demolition dozer uses 353 gallons / 1,334 liters of fluids (fuel, lubricant, coolant, hydraulics, transmission, and steering).

Why is the Colorado route, of all roads in the contiguous land mass of the United States, that WhistlinDiesel could have chosen? For clicks, views, shares, likes, subscribers, and everything else, the social media rules of engagement allow for the relentless pursuit of money. The backstory about a Komatsu D355A and the township of Grandby, Colorado, is the subject of a twenty-year-ongoing debate about one man’s vengeance against authorities.

We won’t go through the details (the story made headlines in national media outlets in June 2004), but the second video briefly presents the events. The key aspects are that a middle-aged welder from Granby, Colorado, bought and modified one bulldozer of the above-specified model and wrecked several buildings in the town, including the town hall.

The law enforcement officers could not stop the 70-ton mastodont since its owner and operator (Marvin Heemeyer) had fitted it with composite armor plating around the cabin and engine bay. Some 200 rounds have been fired at the inexpugnable bulldozer, but nothing stopped it. In fact, it was a mechanical failure that eventually led to capturing the equipment but not the man controlling it.

The heavily modified dozer ran through a building, and its left tread got stuck in the basement, crippling the monster to a dead stop. Still, the police officers couldn’t penetrate through the armor, even when using explosives. Eventually, they gained access to the cabin after cutting through the sandwich plating of two half-inch tool steel sheets and the concrete slab between them.

Over the course of 18 months, Marvin Heemeyer added some 20 tons of weight to the monster bulldozer, covering the vulnerable parts – the engine bay and the cabin. He installed a video system consisting of outside cameras (mounted behind bullet-proof Lexan screens) and in-cabin monitors. When the project was finished, he took the levers, smashed his shop’s back wall down, and went on a demolition rampage.

His Komatsu was identical to what WhistlinDiesel has bought (hence the YouTuber’s repeated references to the unfortunate incident from two decades ago). We don’t know if Cody Detwiler will make a pit stop in Granby, Colorado, but I’m willing to bet chances are in favor of the occurrence.

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Alternatively, he can resto-mod the dozer to rebuild the Killdozer (the name the nefarious destroyer was given after the shocking incidents ended) and play around his Texas property, tearing stuff down. The name was more of an exaggeration since there were no victims of the mechanized stampede, with one exception.

The material damage was estimated at around $7 million at the time. The only fatality was Marvin Heemeyer, who used one of the five firearms in the dozer’s cabin to take his life moments after the Komatsu bulldozer got stuck in a building it was tearing down. Following the investigation, the grizzly Komatsu was taken apart and to several scrapping yards to avoid being bought by collectors as a grim souvenir from a shocking day in the Rocky Mountains.