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IH units are generally perceived as being less desirable/valuable because IH went out of business and was sold to Dresser-Case-Komatsu. Because they were broken up and are now handled by various other manufacturers, parts can be difficult to find for certain models, especially older ones. This can be true of mainstream (not out of business) models like Deere/Case/Cat too if the machine is old enough, but still the perception is there and to some extent it is true. As far as quality of the machine itself, it varies from model to model, year to year. Most of the crawlers IH made were of good quality, pretty much comparable in quality and performance to machines of similar size/class made by the other manufacturers in their time. There were some duds though, I know IH made a really big dozer in the 50's that was just awful. They tried to beat out Cat's D8-D9 series by building a huge, powerful dozer for heavy work. And it was larger and more powerful than what Cat had to offer at the time, which was needed for all of the big highway jobs going on in the 50's. But they didn't properly test and develop it and rushed it to market before it was fully "debugged". Turned out it had very weak final drives and was a miserable, and very expensive failure for IH. One of the many nails in IH's corporate coffin throughout 50's through to the end in the mid 80's. But for most of their crawlers, this wasn't the case. I have a '69 IH 150 loader and so far the only parts I've needed are a few hydraulic lines, filters, oil etc. And I've run the hell out of my machine so far. All of the filters were readily available at local auto parts stores (NAPA/Advance etc), and the hyd lines are universal so any shop can make those up for you. The 100 was pretty popular so used and at least some new parts are still available. If you go to the Redpower site referenced below, you can talk to some folks who run these machines and also sell parts for them. Good luck
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