IH vs Case

[bjamison]

Prior to the merger of IH ag with Case, how did their ag tractor lines match-up? I read a lot about IH tractors (Ford, MF and JD) around the farms, but not much about Case tractors.

Just curious as to what kind of competitor Case was to IH and vice-versa.

 

[tturner]

Im not really a huge expert on that... But I know Case owns Cummins and after the merge case used a lot of IH designs with a Cummins slapped in it. For example... Their popular Magnum series tractor. My mechanic friend has told me that my 5088 tractor (last tractor series IH made) Is pretty much a Magnum with the popular IH 436 motor. Considering I paid 50% less than what a comparable Magnum goes for I am very pleased with it. Just what I was told? I could be wrong. I know friends have said the Case transmission was a money pit.

 

[nqueensland]

I'm not an expert on this topic either, but here's my two cents: As you may or may not know, IH wasn't exctly bought by Case, but by Tenneco, a large diversified company who happened to own Case Corp. They mainly wanted IH for their threshing type machines (combines, cotton pickers, ect) that they currently didn't produce. Luckily they were smart enough to realize the IH ag tractors were a whole lot better than the Case and the new CaseIH tractors were a whole lot IH and very little Case, other than the engines which as mentioned became Cummins.
When I grew up we had a small crop, hog, and cattle farm and had several tractors. The first tractor I used to do any tillage was an 870 Case, and it caused us nothing but problems. Power steering pump, broken rear axle, shift clutches come to mind doing nothing other than pulling a 16 foot field cultivator and a 4 bottom 710 plow. A farmer I worked for had 2 2590 Case tractors and every spring and fall both tractors would be hauled into the shop for a pretty major repair. Dad bought an IH 856 to replace the 870 Case, and while we missed the nicer cab and power shift, the 856 ran for many trouble free years, had more power, and better traction than the Case. We've owned many other field work tractors since then, another 856, 2 1086's, 1586, and I hate to admit, but JD 4430 and 4840, even a 800 Versatile and currently a CaseIH 7140 and these tractors have all been great. The Case tractors, in my opinion, were not well built at all.

 

[dfrisk]

Back in the mid-1980's when Tennaco formed Case/IH by merging IH ag with their Case division, JD was the largest ag co. by percentage of market share in the 70 to 200 HP segment, probably had about 32-35% of the market. IH was second with around 30%. The remaining 35% was divided up between Case, Ford, Allis, White Farm, Duetz, And Massey Ferguson, Belaris, Leyland, SAME, LONG, etc. And some of those last co's piece of the pie were pretty darn small. David Brown was already a Tennaco company since back in 1972 and sorta combined with Case. They still had their own plant in England, but supplied parts to dealers through the Case distibution network and sold tractors through them too.

You have to keep in mind how volatile the large ag tractor market was back from 1979 till 1985. '79 was the largest sales year since the early 1960's. 1980 was a down year, and 1982 was about a QUARTER the size of '80. I remember my Boss at FARMALL getting off the phone with somebody up at IH Corp. Marketing in 1981 and saying that the week before the market had actually turned up in sales, 250 tractors between 60 and 150 HP were sold. My Boss's response was, "Well, IF they all bought Farmall's, that would keep this place running for about TWO days, we can easily make 120 to 150 tractors a day." But that would have required Waterloo,IA (JD), Racine,WI (Case), Charles City, Ia. (White Farm) Birmingham, MI (Ford), West Allis, WI (Allis), to all close their doors.

Oddly enough, M-F was the largest mfg of ag tractors world-wide by number of tractors built & sold until sometime in the 1990's because they were so popular in Europe. Their home office was in France at the time.

Several other European tractor co's too, like Fendt, Fiat, etc. but at the time M-F was the only one actively importing into the US. The Japanese Invasion in the larger size tractors hadn't really started yet with brands like Kubota.

There was SO much merging going on, for instance, Minneapolis-Moline and Oliver merging into White Farm Equipment along with the Canadian division, Cockshutt, in 1969. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Farm_Equipment
Much the same thing happened when Case/IH was merged with New Holland in late 1999. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNH_(company)

It's really hard to compare one time segment to another because the number and names of the players changed so much.

 

[jdiederichs]

Dennis,

Can you enlighten us on the 5188 full powershift tractor which didn't make it to market in time?

 

[dfrisk]

JIM - There was a LOT going on up at Hinsdale with the new 5X88 series. They had a lot of plans but just ran out of time. IH was spending borrowed money on the new ag tractors betting on the future of the ag market. Number I saw published was $7 Million to release the 5X88 series. I suspect a lot of that was the two new Ingersoll Transfer lines installed at FARMALL just before the end of the big strike in spring of '80 for machining the speed & range transmission housings. I was working during the strike driving fork trucks, the spotting semi-tractor they rented to move semi-trailers around. Me and 4-5 other guys moved 2-1/2 Million pounds of gear blank forgings in about two days to make room for the new machines to be installed. It was something to see the HUGE excavator working digging the pits for the machines and the full-size ready-mix trucks running around inside the plant pouring the machine bases.

All the development work was done in Hinsdale at the eng center and then the designs were tossed down to Farmall on how to machine and build them so until close to release we never really knew much about the new stuff. The manufacturing engineers upstairs were clued in as soon as Hinsdale had a firm design but down in our material scheduling area we were almost the last to know.

But sometimes you "stumble" onto things by accident. Like the day a "1586" showed up in shipping that had a WAY different rearend design than the current production tractors. I was dropping something off in shipping with my fork truck and saw this tractor, and the #2 person in QA came running out of the shipping office to chase me away until he saw it was me, then he let me look for a few minutes, even answered a few questions. Tractor was a 5288 in 1586 sheet metal that was going back to Hinsdale in about January 1980, over 1-1/2 yrs before they were scheduled to start building them.

SO... about the only thing I can say about the full power-shift 5X88's was IH was working on them. There is a guy up in SE Minnesota that built a "5388", with a rearend & cab from a C/IH Magnum and the frt end of a 52 or 5488. It bolted right together.

Here's a current topic from the RPM forum about Hinsdale. Some pic's showing the machine shop and engineering drafting/CAD areas. http://www.redpowermagazine.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=76872&st=0

Think I've mentioned here before I delivered SOMETHING from FARMALL to Hinsdale when I was driving over-the-road one night. I did my usual Chicago run from Davenport, IA during the day, got back to the junkyard(terminal) and the Dispatch said he had another run for me. I wanted to use my BIG truck but he said I had to take the straight truck, it was already fueled for me etc. So I threw my stuff in and went over to FARMALL for the pickup. I backed into the dock, walked up onto the dock and the Supervisor who I knew well came over and told me I needed to get back in my truck, they'd load me when the skid got there in a minute or two, and that they would close the door, seal it and I wasn't to open the door for ANY reason. And that when I got to Hinsdale they were expecting me and I was to back into the dock where they directed me and stay in the truck. In other words, what I was hauling was NOBODY's business, expecially mine. And later I found out they asked for Me or other other former FARMALL driver specifically. Inever did know what I was hauling, except it mst have weighed around 1500-2000# by the way the truck ran. It was a L-O-N-G trip running a 52 MPH truck instead of my 67 MPH big truck!

 

[mhomrighausen]

A gentleman from Wheatland, Iowa was a supervisor at the Rock Island FARMALL plant. His name is Orville Boedecker and he was the one that made THE VERY FIRST set of gears for the first prototype 5x88 Series tractor and also made the very last set of gears for the 5488 that was the last tractor to toll off the FARMALL line. Absolutely great guy.

 

[kostendorf]

Not to change the topic but I worked with a Boedecker too back in 1986 at McDonnell Douglas I believe he is the first one on the left ... I'm in this picture too. We are all journyman machinist in the jig bore dept.

 

[mhomrighausen]

Orville B. went to work for HOOF Products Coompany at their Maquoketa, Iowa branch after IH closed their doors at Rock Island. That is where I got to know him. Absolute genuine and upfront supervisor. He started out as just a machine operator making the gears for the 06 series and was so tremendously talented with his work that was the reason (plus he could keep quiet about a special project) he was chosen to make those first gears.

 

[dfrisk]

MARLIN - I was a production scheduler in Dept. 78 sections 2 & 3 from spring of 1977 till that fall. I remember the name Boedecker. Dept 78 was gear hobbing & shaving and all secondary operations like gear tooth rounding for better engagement and gear "Shaving", which was a tooth profile inprovement process where a "Shaving wheel" that looked like another gear was run at an angle to the actual gear and sliced thin slivers of steel off the face of each tooth to give the gear the proper tooth profile. The "Gear Lab" was right next to the two sections of Dept. 78 I scheduled. White Room conditions in there, no dust, dirt, climate controlled. EVERY job that was ran had to have a couple gears approved before it was run.

We had a little manual mill in the corner of the dept that we had a full time person on but didn't really have enough work to keep him busy, but one of the jobs that ran over that mill was "The Little Tin Hats", otherwise known as the throttle lever cap on all the FARMALL H's & M's, and the Super's of them both. Every week I'd check stock on the raw part for milling in the warehouse and get them ordered up to the dept to get a jump on service parts.

What I always thought was absolutely amazing was back by the one set of offices for a neighboring dept. was the "Routing Books". EVERY gear that FARMALL could make had ALL the information down to the machine ID number, fixture numbers, cutter numbers, set-up instructions, timing rates or cycle times for ALL the operations, and ANY special instructions needed to make good parts like how to rack the parts for going thru the heat-treat ovens were manually kept in those books. There were 10-12 carburizing furnaces bigger than a one-stall garage that baskets of gears were fed through to make them hard on the outside for wear improvement and soft on the inside for shock absorption. Typical cycle time was 12, 24, and some gears needed 36 HOURS to complete the cycle.

I heard that for quite a few years, FARMALL had more gear machining capacity than ANY other manufacturing plant in the country in terms of TONS of gears per week, month, year, etc. All the automotive plants made more total gears but they weren't NEAR as big as most of what FARMALL was making. The BULL GEARS in the big tractors weighed 150 to 200# each and there were two in every tractor, plus the service part demands. Then on the other extreme, we made hyd. pump gears that were about the size of a 50 Cent piece and about 3/8" thk.