HARRY, BOB - The ONLY way a CC 1000 would get black parts like the engine, drive shaft, clutch, etc. would be the same way my 72 did... The OWNER painted them black. IH never did, they painted yellow and white, then red for a couple years. Never black. During the early MTD days, a lot of service parts were painted black, as were the chassis of red tractors built for IH dealers, but the yellow/white tractors built for CC dealers were still all yellow & white.
And the answer to paint runs was electrostatic painting equipment. And when painting individual parts, you run just as high a risk of paint runs as you do painting assemblies. Keep in mind, those people had to paint several HUNDRED tractors in an eight hour shift... or paint thousands of individual parts. Which would you rather do? I could see IH LVL buying parts painted by the supplier before assembly, but NOT painting piece parts in-house before assembly. IH was a TRACTOR & implement mfg, not a painting company. There IS such a thing as the thickness of painted surfaces throwing off precision fits of machined parts and assemblies too.
NIC B. - Actually, my last employer found out the same thing FARMALL did back in the late 1970's & early 1980's, that they couldn't afford to FILL UP those Automated Storage & Retrieval Systems. The last 3 yrs I worked at FARMALL, I was responsible for keeping the right stuff in a dedicated ASRS at FARMALL that had 3072 storage bays with over half a million cubic feet of volume. Biggest advantage I had over Anyone else in my position was I had a daily computer report that told me what exactly down to the size and brand of tire I was short for the next week. I finally got inventory down to less than a HALF A DAY's supply on the more popular items of tires & rims. I had several parts I made over 400 inventory turns a year on, with only 225 production days in that year.
The last company I worked at was working on creating a new Just-in-Time inventory system that would reduce inventory from the 17-18 turns per year I was getting down to 40-50+ per year. That was going to save the company Millions of Dollars in inventory carrying costs, so scrapping the little ASRS was actually a good thing, made room for a robot to be installed to feed parts into one of our machining cells.
