Jason W. - I'm at a loss for words..
I will note that there were some comments at one time that that was a contrived photo or load .. Nope- I pulled a lot of loads like that during that winter. The trailer was on the axle lots of times, but the 129 never failed. I was pulling out of the neighbors back woods, about a quarter mile run , hills and bad trail. Both tractor and trailer are still working, although I'm out of wood burning after about 31 years. The beard - yeah, it drove senior management crazy, but I'd cut it off once in '79 and was told to start growing it again by the big boss (wife) - she liked it. The dark is all gone now - 13 years running mainframe operations for a statewide LEO network did that..
Sorry I didn't get back to you yesterday, but you got sage advise from several of the other "greybeards"..
On another note, I've started pulling the donor 149 apart to remove the hydraulics. I plan on keeping the 129's diff and just putting the 149's pump on it. I'm a little leery of the pump, haven't pulled the rear cover off the diff yet, we'll see how the internals look, hopefully better than the outside, as far as fluid..