The Big and The Small of Things

Welding man

Well-known Member
Location
West Virginia
I snapped this just for fun. It is really sad to me to see what a great line of tractors and equipment Ford had back in the day from the biggest to the smallest. Now we have junk from all over the world that you can't get parts for and no one can fix.

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Nice tractors. I had a 1500 4wd that I bought new in 1980. A local popcorn farmer just had to have it to cultivate his popcorn back in the spring. I sold it to him for more than I paid for it in 1980, I'm already missing it.
 
Makes you wonder how a company that was in the tractor and medium and heavy duty truck business just shut all of that down.
 
As I've said before, I believe that the Ford Motor Company considered their Tractor Operations as a red-
headed step child for a long time, slowly and progressively letting it die on the vine into the 1980s when
they finally got rid of it. While it can be argued that they came out with some quality products in earlier
years (e.g. the 2000-5000 series in 1965), they got lazy and didn't try to keep up with Deere as time went
on.

This is my opinion only. I'd love to hear/debate contrasting ideas.
 
Bern I think it was all about the almighty dollar. The tractor and Big truck divisions weren't making as much money as the cars and pick-ups and they dumped them both to please the big stockholders. They started pushing the little dealers out in the mid 80's. A friend of mine and his family had been a dealer since the late 40's. They were a small dealer by most standards, but had a good parts and service department. In 1951 they sold 101 new 8N's. In 1985 Ford pulled their franchise. I have all the special tools, books, Service bulletins some of the old parts.
 
I agree about it being all about the dollars. Which is why FoMoCo wanted to get rid of FTO.

How far back do your service bulletins go? Got anything pre-1965? I'm particularly interested in 6000 stuff, anything I can get.
 
I never worked at Ford, but I worked at three other auto manufactures and these companies have a bad quarter or two and decide they need to simplify operations.
How do you build a business on a product that can easily last two or three generations? Henry Ford was a farm kid, like Porsche, and Fiat, but Ford's excellent
50s-70s products owed a lot to European designers who still made products for farming at a smaller scale a time when US farms consolidated in size and shifted to
larger and more complex equipment. So the market moved and IHCase and JD stayed in and Ford decided to step out. It's sad because the Ford product was so good,
and they could use their existing distribution and service to support it, but there is only so much focus a company can spend away from it's core business. Bug
Eyed Bill never got farm dirt under his nails, be sure of that. The only sweat he knew was the sweat of failure when the Detroit Lions performance consistently
sucked.
 

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