[AJD] late B

[Dean VP]

Guy:

It appears from JD's Tractor Production records: "Tractor Production John
Deere Waterloo Tractor works 1923-1960. Premier Issue of Tractor Digest
Published Spring 1994. That JD's production cycle for new model (next years)
production usually (some exceptions) in the June/July/August time frame and
ramping up with dips sometimes in the August, September months. 

If one looks at the serial numbers of the new tractors built during those
starting months also coincides with significant changes to many different
parts with follow on typically minor changes occurring randomly during the
rest of the production year.  However, 1947 year models were a good example
of an exception year. 

So I think my concept of model year changes holds water but a better
definition might be the last half of the year or starting about the middle
of the year. But not really noticeable at the dealer/farmer level until the
later months of the year. 

I can see that JD would start production of the next year's (new) models
about mid year, start shipping and filling the distribution pipeline, branch
and dealer inventory and then have a big splash about the "New" models which
probably didn't occur in the actual field until months later in the same
year.

JD was pretty consistent with this production/major change cycle with some
notable exceptions. 


So I still maintain that JD followed typical Automotive practice of making
major changes at the model year break which from a production point of view
occurred 6 or so months earlier.   But apparently didn't define them as the
next year's numerical number just that they were "new".  The Duck is still a
duck!  :-)

Dean A. Van Peursem
Snohomish, WA 98290

I'm a walking storeroom of facts..... I've just lost the key to the
storeroom door 


www.deerelegacy.com

http://members.cox.net/classicweb/email.htm



-----Original Message-----
From: antique-johndeere-bounces at lists.antique-tractor.com
[mailto:antique-johndeere-bounces at lists.antique-tractor.com] On Behalf Of
Guy Fay
Sent: Tuesday, May 31, 2005 7:57 PM
To: Antique John Deere mailing list
Subject: Re: [AJD] late B

Dean, speaking from IH side, and knowing a little bit about other companies:
Yes, changes were sometimes bunched-major tooling changes, improvements 
rather than fixes, etc. In thinking about some of the dates, I'm not 
sure that your theory is quite accurate. Yes, some changes happened 
towards the end of a year. But at least in IH land, other things 
happened. They tended to avoid the end of the year-usually, September on 
up was prime production time. Some changes happened in the March-April 
era, when the main production push was winding down- they could get some 
tractors out at the tail end and see what the customers did to them that 
the testing program didn't. Sometimes, major packages waited until near 
the end of a labor contract- if the guys went out on strike ( or a 
little before) the company could make productive use of the downtime. A 
factory expansion or rebuild would also see several changes put into place.

Sometimes if inventory was up some, and they needed to rope back, they 
took the layoffs to do the packages- or they kept making changes, and 
when the lines started up again, there was a bunch of new stuff.
Yes, changes were also made during the inventory periods too- IH used to 
shut down factories for a two week inventory towards the end of the 
summer. Old business practices!
To be sure, dealers hot notifications when a major bunch of changes 
happened- but even major groups of changes weren't necessarily on the 
same serial number- they might be phased in over a few days.
Guy