RRLUND Oliver and Moline

JOCCO

Well-known Member
RR: One of my thoughts was to have an oliver 550 and have it painted up to be a MM 550 or some such!!!! Far as I know they never made them in MM. There was a cockshutt 550 and a later white 2-44. Moline had a UTB/long 445 or similar in there line up. I do have a nice oliver 550 I restored and use. Those later molines 750 etc never sold well in my area as the dealers were pretty well gone and the same for White tractors.
 
There was a G550 which was the Oliver 1555 in yellow. The G350 and G450 were the Fiats in MM decor. I recall the yellow Olivers being jockeyed in during the 1980's due to low cost but recall very very few being sold new in the 1970's. The diehard MM guys were put off by the dismissal of the MM tech and the Oliver guys felt a betrayal that their tractor would be in any other color than meadow green and clover white. Like we discussed in the tread yesterday that the most desirable size HP-wise was the 1855 which had the 310 engine which failed to live up to expectations. It took until the Silver and Black Whites to get the most desirable HP categories squared away. There should have been coordination between Charles City and Minneapolis, MN as soon as White was formalized in the early 1960's in terms of product upgrade instead of running two sales organizations.
 
Yes after 670/302 and jet star 3, Moline was dying around here. There best dealer support was in the prairie gold years and then what dealers that hung on till the end. Oliver hung on a little stronger. Cockshutt suffered the same fate as MM (not many of the later ones sold) Also seems like massey and deere came on stronger.
 
I've always theorized that a minor problem MM had was the slower turning engines. Guys got into trouble with MM tractors breaking cranks and throwing rods because they would run them up to 2500 RPM's like an 806. MM should have recognized they were fighting a hopeless battle to get guys to break habits from other brands and re-engineered the 451 and 504 to run at 2250 engine RPM's. At the same time those engines could have been upgraded to spin-on filters and integrated turbocharging. White's cost to do this would have been minimal as the tooling was already there to make the jugs, head, and crankcase which would have needed minimal change. Make the new engine available company wide. They could have experimented for a bunch of years starting in 1964 to work out the bugs. We know that companies go out and buy a competitor's new release so White could have looked at the 806 and 4020 for engine ideas.
 
You are not very informed. What makes you think that there were no new models of tractors and engines in the works?

White Motors was making money on their farm equipment line, but they spent it on their truck line that wasn't making money.
 
There were new models in the works but White had no money to put them into production as they could not afford to upgrade the factory tooling to do it. Like you said all the money was being dumped into trucks but the bottom line was the new tractors could go no further than a testing phase. IIRC it cost Deere tens of millions to upgrade the factory for the New Generation tractors it no doubt would have cost White that much. The IVT transmission needed new tooling among other features on the new Olivers. I fault management for not taking that into consideration and not having a bridge ready until the new products could go into production. The MM plant would have meant building a large cubic inch displacement motor in house and gain efficiencies on production lines that no doubt were not running to capacity by 1970. Oliver was weak in terms of the increasingly important 100-150 HP segment of the market. I've heard different stories as to why the 310 was expanded in the 55 series but the most likely management did for cost savings even if it made for an inferior tractor. My understanding was the dealers and block men were pushing for larger engines for the 1855 and 1955 tractors. Deere had the 404 for the 4020,4320,4520, and 4620 tractors and IH had the 407 for the 856,1256 and 1456.
 
The later 504 L P and the 585 diesel did turn 2200. I think there was a delay somewhere in the White corporate engine development. I saw one of the corporate engine at the White factory in Canton Ohio in 1977.
 
The area dealer here always recommended running the 585 in a Plainsman at 1700-1800 RPM. I don't know if he did that based on experience or what. The story always was by the area MM guys that farmers would run MM's faster than they should because an IH could be run that fast. Now the 585 in a 2-150 could be a different matter although I don't know other than the external oil pump why there should be a difference. I wish I could have seen the engine that you saw to know what was done. If I can learn from somebody who was there then that is good. I know a couple guys who worked for White but not everybody has the same access to any given point of information.
 
You're right. There was a new tractor in development that had a CVT transmission and a whole new engine. I've seen a few pictures. If that tractor had made it from testing to production,nobody would have caught up for 20 years.
 

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