High hour Whites or Olivers

This post is from a dyed on the wool Oliver and white guy, and my question is what is the highest hour White or four digit Oliver that you have heard of?
the highest hour White I know of in my area is a 12,000 hour severely abused White 2-110 that looks like is been through a few world wars. I worked
for a guys who had a John Deere 2755 that had nearly 30000 on it before the rears gave out. To my knowledge the engine had never been touched.
Seems the whites and Olivers just don't pack the stamina the other brands have.

Several 225 horsepower John Deere around here with over 20,000 hours and never been opened up . Friend has a 2-135 series 1 white with 13,000 hours an it looks like it but works . Grandpas 4020 had over 20,000 on it before it was overhauled and it was do for it to

I?ve got an 88 diesel with over 6000 hours on it

You can't compare the hours on those old mechanical tachs to the new electronic ones. 13,000 on a mechanical tach is likely about the same as 30,000 on an electronic one.

Actually, the difference is quite a bit less. I noticed about 20 to 25 percent higher hours on the electronic tach. This may vary depending on the proportion of pto hours vs. Idling hours type of use.

Ben

Might go the other way too depending on how many times the switch was left on.

There are nowhere near as many Olivers and Whites as there are Deeres. So the odds of finding a 30,000 Oliver are much slimmer. These 30,000 hour Deeres are rare in and of themselves.

Heck around here tractors with more than 10,000 hours were unheard of until BTOs took over and all the small farms disappeared. When you'd go to a small farm auction, a tractor from the 1960's or 1970s with 5000 hours on it was a high hour tractor. It was "wore out." Ready for the salvage yard.

I've got over 11,000 on my 2-135 White. My Oliver 1550 gas has over 9600.

One thing that I have learned about hours on tractors. Most of the crop only farmers near me, cropping 2-3,000 acres, actually put very few hours on their tractors nowadays. Many of these big tractors only pull a no till planter in the spring, and a grain cart at harvest. Self propelled sprayers , and zero cultivation, and no crops to bale, leave tractors on crop farms collecting few hours each year. Tractors on livestock farms on the other hand, totally different story. Forage cropping, and manure handling as well as feeding livestock can stack thousands of hours on tractors. During the time when Oliver tractors were being built, farms were not as big in the livestock side. And the crop farmers kept up a steady pace of rapid growth, with larger and larger tractors and equipment coming on to the market after 1974, the tractors branded with the Oliver name became too small for many cash crop farmers to keep in their fleet. My thinking is many of the used Oliver tractors that got traded in during the late 70?s and early 80?s were sold on to smaller farms were they wouldn?t see more than 2-300 hours per year. The people that were buying new tractors in the 80?s and 90?s wanted much higher hp tractors with 4wd, and very few Oliver tractors fit this bill.

Hour meter is wired through the oil pressure switch and will not count until oil pressure builds and or alternator is working.
Ben

My 2-135 will click up hundredths of hours when I flip the manifold heater on. I always joke that the tractor doesn't have very many hours,but the heater does. lol

Never seen a real tractor that the hour meter would run without the engine running . On my 92 dodge I didn?t have a odometer so I wired a hour meter in so I could figure out how many hours I could go before needing fuel went anywhere from 17 to 19 depending on what I was pulling

As a longtime Hyster fleet mechanic I can tell you all else being equal good pm goes a long way.Red,blue,yellow,silver or two shades of green it don't matter.Good pm is the key to long service life.Sure like the looks of some of the Whites tho.lol
Paul

Had a 350 long(fiat built in early 70?s) on a low lift 18? PTO pump.it was used to flood our rice fields/crawfish ponds.it had 13700 hrs on it.but never did anything but that.would run 24/7 for weeks on end.never over 1700 RPM

This old 1650 has an estimated 15,000 to 16,000 hours on it.....the tach broke in 1992 and it had 11,000 hours on it then....it continued to feed cows every day for another 18 years after that, since the cows left it picks up round bales and does odd jobs around the farm.

A lot of truth in that, especially with Whites. Most of them leak so darn much hydraulic oil that constantly monitoring fluid levels is a must in order to prevent major damage. They must have used the cheapest seals known to man on those early whites.

I sure agree with you Bruce, when I retired a couple of years ago I sold a 1988 Deere 4850 with 2600 hours and a 1997 Deere 8100 with 2320 hours. With a 16 row planter you could plant close to 200 acres a day with either one of those tractors and would not use over a half a tank of fuel. On the other hand my brother bought a new 4255 out at the ranch in Colorado and the first thing I knew that tractor had 10,000 hours. It had to run every day feeding besides baling hay all summer long. The longest running engines that I was ever around were the engines driving gas compressors which would run 30 to 40,000 hours without an overhaul. These engines were running on natural gas off the well and were running at 50% of rated load and running slower than most engines of their capacity. They were mostly Waukesha, Cat and Gemini engines and were designed to run completely unattended for thirty days at a time.