300 Utility - Demonstrator??

bengelsman · Apr 13, 2009

I just bought a 300 Utility tractor. It is painted the off-white color and I can"t find any evidence that it was ever a different color. Can anyone tell me how I could find out if this tractor was a demonstrator?

ScottyHOMeY · Apr 13, 2009

The white demonstrators pre-dated the 300 by several years. The lack of any other color suggests it was ordered in white from IH.

bengelsman · Apr 13, 2009

Thanks for the information. There's probably no way of knowing what shade of white that paint may have been, is there? Did they paint these tractors any color the customer wanted? Or were there standard colors?

ScottyHOMeY · Apr 13, 2009

That last is a good question. My underastanding is that they would paint a tractor any color you wanted. In that era, I expect they stocked mostly just their customary reds and whites of-the-week in the tractor plants, as well as blue and maybe black in the implement plants. Apart from that, various yellows and oranges were popular for tractors intended for construction or road work, OD, grays and blues for military sales, and probably some standard colors for tractors that would be sold to larger customers for modification (shop mules and the like), if those weren't delivered in bare primer to be painted by the customer later.

bengelsman · Apr 13, 2009

I know you can contact the Case Corporation to get a copy of the build sheet for most of the old Case tractors. Do you know of a way to get a look at the build sheets for these? You've got my curiosity up now. I'd love to know what color it was coming out of the factory.

ScottyHOMeY · Apr 13, 2009

I don't believe those are available at all for the IHs. The great bulk of IH records are with the Wisconsin Historical Society archives. Some of what they have is available online and consists mostly of annual serial number runs, production numbers, photos and paint commitee decisions (for general application, not custom orders). If such things as you're looking for do exist, I expect you'd have to contact them about how to go about searching for it. The conventional wisdom is that IH, unlike some other manufacturers, didn't keep records to that level of detail. Perhaps, if you could first (from the serial numbers)nail down the year and month your tractor was built, and it was part of a larger order, they MIGHT have something.

bengelsman · Apr 13, 2009

The serial number is 15500 which means it's a 1955, but I have no idea what month it was made in.

ScottyHOMeY · Apr 13, 2009

Looks like November.

You may have to zoom in or out and pan around on the records for them to be legible enough to make sense.
1955 records

bengelsman · Apr 13, 2009

Thank you. It looks like it was built in June, 1955. I'll see if I can dig a little deeper.

ScottyHOMeY · Apr 13, 2009

Give her another look. That first line, which I suspect you were looking at is for the Farmall 300, a different beast. The 300U had a prefix of I300, which is on the third line.

The whole thing is kinda faint at 50%, but if you click the button to enlarge it, it comes up pretty clearly.

bengelsman · Apr 14, 2009

Thanks. It looks like November, 1955.

300 Utility - Demonstrator??

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