Large Frame IH 4wh drive tractors

NY 986

Well-known Member
Just following a thread over on Red Power. They never sold well around here and the V8 equipped tractors were thought to be especially thirsty. Probably did not help that the couple large volume IH dealers were heavy into Steiger. I've been told that the profit for IH dealers from IH itself was shrinking during the 1970's so that gave added incentive to sell non-IH products. Some of the large IH dealers also sold New Holland. JD outsold IH in the large 4wh drive category during those days and Case plus MF did well.
 
Well, word gets around pretty fast, at least here it does, and that 800 cubic inch engine did not stand up, A'Men to that, enough said.You say Massey sold well they didn't here,they had two poor engines also, that high reveing 3208 and the later ones, had the 903 nothin,that was a short lived engine also! It was Deere and Versatile,that had the market here! A friend had a Steiger Super Wild Cat, with that 3208, he put on 32 different alternator's on it, Steiger threw up that hands and wouldn't talk to him about it,make a long story short they had it mounted way out there, the bracket wasn't strong enough, so it vibrated, and shook to much!
 
Versatile flat out was not here in the Northeast during the hey day of IH. I think that the earliest might have been 1983-1984 with the idea that IH was going under and that Steiger might get folded into what was to take the place of IH which was Case IH. The IH dealers that had Steiger also had the best territories to sell them in so it really was not worth it for the other IH dealers to gear up for Steiger as the market was not there locally. Our nearest IH dealer did better than average and I can count at least 3 86 series large frame 4wh drive tractors sold in their territory. But a handful of high HP tractors is not enough to buy the sign and stock parts for an entire new line of product. Deere did well in that they had high volume minded dealers in the areas where large tractors would sell well. If I had to guess Deere and Steiger ran about even in terms of sales. As to the engines in the IH's I don't think any of those tractors had the optimum engine in them. Guys had trouble keeping engines in 4386's. When I say that MF did well they soaked up the market that was not going to buy JD, IH, or Case meaning they took away from AC and White. There were a couple of powerhouse MF dealers as well and they got market share because they were already a presence.
 
OK, that makes sense, but the only thing that Massey sold well was their combines, there Grain drill, corn planters,swathers,just dint cut it, but a few round, because they were a Vermmer ! Did u ever see that you clip, on the interview of the one Steiger Brother, it's informative, they moved to Fargo, i don't even know whats going on there now,i suppose they make the Quad tracks there, but that belt setup on them was invented by a guy out of Casselton North Dakota!
 
MF grain drills and plows seemed decent and by the 1970's they had Badger which had respectable equipment. I am a ways east of where the big MF dealers were so I don't know how they rounded out their lineup or if they just got by with MF/Badger. Gleaner easily outsold MF in NY. Back to IH it was just a couple of IH dealers that carried Steiger in NY. Probably there were some IH dealers that would not have minded carrying Steiger but were probably considered too close to the dealers that did have a Steiger franchise. The nearest IH dealers had Glencoe and Brillion for their sidelines.
 
Those 4366,4386, and the 800 cube inch engines was the 560 all over again here, just total junk, i wander why they had the problem's they had, that 466, i never saw one over 1200 hours that kept running, but never seen one threw a rod out the block either, but they were basically junk in my book!
 
The 466 was an excellent engine in most applications other than the 4386. I will say that when in the 3788 they did not like being pushed like a Steiger. The 86 series 4wh drive tractors no doubt cost IH business in terms of dealers taking on Steiger and other dealers missing out on deals to other brands. I think that around here that Case outsold IH in that category. Fortunately for a number of dealers here that were in small and medium dairy country the problems with the large tractors were not an issue.
 
Probably, the much bigger problem for IH dealers then was lack of a modern corn planter, lack of a top shelf round and square baler, and late to update their combine line to the 14XX series.
 
I guess we didn't know the 4568 was junk - it was to busy getting thousands of hours a year put on it. The biggest issue we had with ours was the dealership didn't know crap about them and we spent time in the field fixing/working around their screw ups. In the 8000 hours we put on ours the big issue was the clutch - replaced 3 times in a month before it was finally installed correctly and the starter was a similar issue. Both times it due to incorrect parts and installation. Surprising enough that 800 CI engine was extremely easy to start.
 
Well i am sorry if i hurt your feeling's,but they didn't sell very good here,and the ones that did, didn't stand up! Max Ulmer a very well to do farmer and good IHC patron bought one, run it a couple years, just put it in the shed,bought a Versatile,farmed 3-4 more years, had a auction,they couldn't even get a bid on it!
 
There were a fair amount of the Ih 4356,6,86,series tractors around here sold and seemed to stand up pretty well. The V-8's didn't last that well. Then Stieger came along and it all went to them lots of power and would pull the world with a big enough lever. The local Ford tractor dealer was the Stieger dealer here. They got their nose out of shape whrn the local CaseIh dealer got the nod later after Fiat changed the product lines so they were odd man out on the Stieger dealership. Sucks because they had all the old books for the green models and will not talk to you about questions you might have on them.
 
I have to disagree with you a little. Anybody that says 90nothing means they don't know anything about these engines. We had a Versatile 950 with that 903 and that was the best tractor we ever had. That engine/tractor would go up and down our hills and never drop more then 100-200 rpms. It pulled like a locomotive and you could take off at an idle with the plow in the ground if you wanted too. Couldn't do that with our 976 that came afterwards. That tractor was a dog with that 855. We've had a few 855s since then and while they are a good engine overall none of them ever matched that 903. And I have neighbors with similar experiences. Even the dealership that sold Versatile which was Torgersons admitted that indirectly one time. Only engine I've had that would match and surpass the 903 in the torque/lugging department are the Cat 3406s. The 903s in the Versatiles were popular around here and they might not have been a 10,000 hr engine but plenty went past 5,000 hr and on up just fine.

We also had a MF 1800 with the Cat 3160. Now we might be the exception but we never lost the engine in the 8 years we ran it. And we abused it treating it like a 300 hp tractor. In fact when we went to trade it in for the Versatile 950, the salesman wanted to discount us on the clutch because he was assuming it was shot with the size of plow we were pulling.
 
That's the first time I've seen anybody call the 466 junk. And it was on an IH forum no less. If you can't get 1,200 hrs out of a 466 that's deliberate operator abuse. That goes for any engine.
 
I bet i seen 40 ads in the farm paper's 4366, for Sale,years ago, just overhauled 1080 hours or so,yea the dealer did overhaul them, but they didn't read the rods, they were bent after that many hours, They had a 5.35 in stroke at 2800 rpm,high idle, nothing will stand that, especially with the 361 rod and main brgs,that's all they had for brgs,In the 4366! Yeah they stood up in trucks and other application, but not in the tractors. The Minneapolis Tribune and the St Paul Pioneer Press that's all they used 7 days a week to deliver the newspapers, but they did not stand up in the tractors !
 
No. I've tried setting up accounts there but for whatever reason I could never get logged in. Might try again soon as I recently changed computers. Might be fate intervening as I know some of the guys there can be a little hard headed. I like IH products well in excess of tractors but I am not going to gloss over shortcomings there or on the company itself. We have also had good luck with other brands including JD so the bash sessions don't interest me. I can remember more than one incident where I thought the JD dealer valued our business a whole lot more than the IH dealer did. A few guys there tell it straight regardless of the subject.
 
I grew up around a 4386 that ran for many trouble free years, I think it was overhauled at least once.
in the fall it pulled a 28' 496 IH disk and a 9 or 11 shank glencoe soil saver, occasionally it pulled a 9 shank vripper also, in the spring it was on a 35' field cultivator...
we always wished it had a pto for the grain cart..
it was a great tractor for us, the biggest annoyance from it was the brake caliper Or the linkage to it would stick and get the brake rotor hot, the other thing with it was the gearing, you were always too fast or too slow..I have a lot of fond memories of that tractor and disking corn stalks..

I worked for a construction company that ran 4 or 5 4366s on sheep's foot rollers and offset disks none of them gave too much trouble...

I will agree that the DVT 800 was not a good tractor engine,it was never made for a farm tractor, it was a truck engine pure and simple, Id always heard it did ok in a truck, it also did pretty well in a construction type machine too like a bulldozer or scraper because those had torque converters behind them, the DVT 800 didn't like lugging or hard pulls like a farm tractor does regularly, another thing really going against the 4568-4786 was the puny air filter for that big v8...

I always wished IH would have put there dt or DTI 817 in those tractors instead, I think they would have had something then but it was the 70s and everybody was v8 crazy, everybody picks on the IH 4wds but realistically none of the other major company's offered anything much better, by a major company Im not counting steiger or versatile...
I grew up around a Steiger PT 225 also, that was a tractor...
 

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