Buy a tractor, take a trip.

Buy a tractor, take a trip promotion from AC in the old days.

https://youtu.be/sSVOpK4Pf88

How could Allis have faltered so fast and so badly? Was it the lack of 3 point? Was it something else? Financial? They were a massive, huge industrial giant, and then - poof, almost overnight gone. Very weird.

They recooked everything to the limit, they only had two engines the C and D17 engine, until they bought Buda. When my brother went on the trip,one of the tour guides admitted building Industrial item was easier, because they had a blueprint to follow, so in other words they didn't know what the farmer really wanted. The XT and the D-21 didnt make any customer loyalty,my brother bought a XT, it didnt even come with working hydraulic remote tips. After about 2 years that was gone! That was the last Allis on his farm!

They got caught in some kind of price-fixing in their electrical division dealings with the gov't in the early 60's, I think. As a result, they had to divest of some of their holdings in that line of business and that may have been what was keeping things profitable at the corporate level. I either read about this or did a paper on it in college 40+ years ago - I can't remember the details anymore. FIL who worked for GE knew all about it, as it apparently was big news in the industry back then.

Tim

Very interesting video.
I would have been a Harpursville H.S. freshman in the fall of 62, and we had a very active AC dealer in
Harpursville, but I dont recall anything about that promo. It would have been 4 years since Dad took
on a massive debt of $45,000 to buy the Gracemore Farm, and I doubt he would have been in the market for
any new tractor, let alone an Allis.

WOW, i didnt know anything about that, it seems every body wants to take advantage of the goverment,even had a local pharmacist, tried that in our little town, he lost his license for life.

It's all very complicated. First, I would have thought that the various divisions would have been
insulated from each other, when hit with court orders on the Electrical case. (I'd never heard of that
before.) Second, banks had a lot of control, with investment loans, and interest rates. Allis had stepped
in when Ford closed and moved to Ireland. They had a break-through with the 1938 Model B. They positioned
themselves to serve the two-horse farmer with 160 acre farms. In the latter 60's, this base began to rapidly
disappear. This was probably aggravated by government farm programs and tax laws which favored bigness.
Internally, there had to be something lagging in management. Lack of vision, lack of courage, lack of respect.
This may have affected recruitment of talent, and driven fear into the designers and engineers who couldn't get
their warnings about designs and problems up the chain of command. Meek and submissive design leaders are kind of
bad news. Lots of psychological scenarios could have inhibited progress.
At this time, there was a tremendous need to invest in digital computing and numerical control machine tools.
Outside consultants may have underestimated the amount of stress and strain that had to be designed into the
machines. If they had used internal staff, they might have understood better the development history and worked
upwards from there. Maybe the hazards of scaling up a tractor were not understood. It's all pretty complicated.
Who knows all the human factors and pressures involved?
Allis history