AC D-19 turbo diesel versus JD 4010 diesel

I'm an Allis guy through and through but given a choice of it id take the 4010 any day. I never spent hours on end driving a d19 but I have operated several and worked on several gassers and 1 diesel In my career. Dad talked about one diesel in particular they sold and the customer consistently had problems with the bottom end of the engine, now Bob had Allis tractors before and after the d19 and never had engine problems with any of the other tractors. They just feel too bulky for the power they produced, never cared for the feeling of sitting down between the fenders and below the hood line on the 19's. A good Xt or 200 with 38" rubber on the back are superior to any 4010 or 4020 out there in my opinion. Don't even get me started on the gaw gaw gaw noise of the hydraulic pump on those Deere tractors, I doubt most Deere owners could honestly tell you what a 6 Cylinder is actually supposed to sound like after listening to the hyd noise all day!!!!

My Dad bought a used JD 3020 LP. We got it probably about 1971 or 72 I would guess. I had grown up driving a JD720 LP. The thing that still sticks out from when we got the JD 3020 LP was the super smooth power steering. And you sat on it nice. That power steering was really good though, we had the JD 720 and it had power assist steering I would call it. We did not have a D17 or D19 on the farm when I grew up. I have a series 1 D17 now and I like it alot. But I wish it had that same feel of the JD 3020 power steering.

Well here are just a few rememberances from over the years and some thoughts on this thread...
  Been reading this thread and thinking about the many things of the old machines... Was raised on a WD, WC, another WD and then WD45 and an early D17.  After that one we got a D17 diesel in 1970 and had it overhauled and boy was that a workin beast and efficient on fuel. D17 gas pulling 3-14 would burn  tank of fuel to the diesel pulling 4-14 at the same speed and still have a quarter tank or so left.  Then we got a  used 170 in 1974 and then in 1977 got an 190XT followed by another 190 XT just before the series III, then an Oliver 1855 with a rebuilt engine. we got a  a massy 44 diesel mixed in and a MD, which we used several years for hauling wagons down the road. Another 190 gas then an Oliver 77... and a ford 9000 and a 4520 and mix of others.
 The WD was converted to propane in 1960 and it sits under a 33 picker just waiting to go pick corn. No powersteering on it but it was a good tractor. I keep thinking I need to get it out from under that picker after 45 years or so and have some fun with her, but she's kind of slow compared to all the others.
 The 1937 WC is just sitting under a Farmhand loader when the chloride ate the rims out . The other WD has starter ring gear problems and can't start it when hot with the Zenith carb on it. It had a 7' Kosh bellie mount mower put on back in 1967 and hasn't been off since.. Used it for weed control under fences after we got the haybine in 1970. It sure could have used PS on it too, but steers easier than running a scythe. LOL
 The WD45 started to have some problems and got parked waiting for some TLC. It sure had more power than the second WD.
The first XT is still on the job  with two injector pump rebuilds, a turbo replacement, a foot clutch replacement and now needs 2spd and pto clutches reworked and a going through in the transmission for it is starting to jump out of 4th gear... 40 years on the job... I still love that tractor, only job it does now is baling round bales. Been shifted thousands and thousands of times.  Power steering is much faster than the John deere's and the platform as mentioned is much better and the console controls at your right hand as well as the throttle and two spd/clutch.
 When hell is happening at the end of the pto, I can step the clutch in and step on the brakes and everything is stopping, not grabbing for some dinkasc lever placed somewhere out of a simple hands reach and hydraulic controlled that slams in on startup. and the hydraulic pump is live and simple compared to the closed system.  Yes, I like the feel of sitting up on the XT much better than on the johndeere.   The XT won't over heat if you keep the radiators clean but the 4520, push it to hard, you can watch the gauge start moving up as the hydraulics get hotter too. Somebody mentioned that hydraulic noise on the JD and I hate that noise too.  Would say the old 1855 was really nice, despite the pump system was also a closed loop and the pump cost north of 1300 back 30 years ago.  It had 3 spds shift on the go and power brakes and independant pto with that little lever to the back if the console... and had 2spd pto too. But the rebuilt Waukesha engine was not assembled right and after many years, it dropped a sleeve. Back to the XT.  The later XT dragged both a 4 bottom and the oliver 5-16 bottom plow. just as good as that 1855 did.  The ford 9000 got a hole in the block, end of story on that. The MM705 was a clumsy ox an no live pto or 3pt on most of them.  One thing I didn't like about Oliver was to get an honest 540 rpm out of the pto, you had to wind them up wide open, where as the AC  didn't need to be wound wide open.  Better part of the XT's were they were very fuel efficient compared to some of the others... neighbors 966 was burning near 7 gallons an hour and wasn't getting a whole lot more done than we were.
 The 170 had the hand clutch and foot clutch replaced back in the early 80's and then I yanked the head off and replaced the exhaust valves and ground the seats and intakes back in '07 and was planning on dropping the pan to put new rings in but ran out of time. Had to get it back together to feed cows with it...  Now it really needs an out of frame overhaul, but still on the job. TOUGH tractor, wish all the others were as tough...     Funnier part is , I feel I could do more with that 170 and loader than I could do with the 190 and loader.
 As for the D19, Allis should have done more in building the parts heavier in the D19, heavier axels, heavier bull gears and bearings, pinion/ ring gear/ differential/ along with a better transmission. Then put in a 85 hp engine like a D-344 in instead of dropping a turbo on a light weight Lanova design Buda engine.   You know, make it more bullet proof.
    Just a few years later, the M&W industry  started selling Turbochargers for Case, Oliver, MM, Ford, IH, JD and others.  and then those tractors started self destructing.    ... Should remember, when Allis bought out Buda, they took the industrial engine that was a time proven engine in the industrial and derated the 230 diesel from 2700rpm no load /2460 load at 72 hp and made it struggle at 1625 at 45 pto hp.. or maybe 50 bhp...  Then they redesigned it for the D17 and beefed it up and then redesigned it for the later D19 and also another redesign for the Series IV D17... squezzin hp out of old design when they should have been getting the 2800 out with direct injection for the 19 and the 4 cylinder version for the 17.... like AC's little 433 that went into the 6060/6080's . Could have been years ahead of their time.
 Seen a D19 at an auction that had the series IV/170 torque tube and pump and a rear end from a 190 with heavy axels at an auction, should have bought it... 2 spd pto, 3 pt., hand clutch, and the unreliable 262 turboed diesel that sounded real good... but I guess couple others wanted it worse than me, went over three grand.

  In reality, it really comes down to who owns what... some fellas can buy a new tractor and have it looking and running like hell in just a few years while others can have their tractors and machinery looking and running like almost new 20 years later...
  ... And any tractor that works and runs like it should is Okay with me... but wish I had a new 170 and a new XT.

 Just another tidbit of info on the JD PShift, Harold Brock, the designer of Ford's Select-o-Speed made the prototype and it was working pretty good, but not great in his opinion and told Ford to wait while he worked the bugs out of it and they did not listen. So, he left them and went to deere and told them he would design them a better powershift that would out perform Ford's design, he knew all the faults of that system so, he designed a new system and got the prototype out and was put into production. He did it out of spite against Ford. Heard it from a man that worked on Ford select-o-speeds for a living, then did it in his retirement... and was friends with the Harold. LOL. Found a link to the man.
http://www.farmanddairy.com/columns/21291/21291.html

Allis dave wrote: IMO the D19 was just behind the JD times a little. Featurewise, you'd be better to compare it to a JD 720. Even though they were released at the same time, it's just hard to compare a D19 to a 4010

I agree.

BTW I never had much trouble with my D19 in all the years I've owned it. Since 1987. It was for a time the most used tractor on Dad's farm. I bought it myself and planned on taking over Dad's dairy farm at one time. That never happened but it got used a lot. And I rented 80 acres besides on my own. Add that to Dad's 300 acres that he ran. It saw plenty of field time and the D17 was demoted to a loader tractor and other duties when the D19 was otherwise tied up. Although the D17 was probably Dad's best tractor he ever owned and it still got ran virtually every day. That's another subject.

Loader work was no worse than the D17 and the D17 was a good loader tractor. In fact the D19 could do more with the loader compared to the 17.

As far as mechanical problems, I put in a new governor shaft and seal because it was so worn and leaked oil all the time. I rebuilt the carb a few times, the brakes once, a lever down on the hydraulic pump broke once for an unknown reason, that was a pain to take out without a shop to work in -20˚ January weather, or a good way to hold that heavy pump up while you bolt it back in place, ..............and the hydraulic valves, towards the end of it being a main tractor on the farm, the hydraulics were needing work in the valve area as it would sometimes not operate a remote cylinder without playing with the hydraulic lever and the lift arms would hold a load anymore.

Never really had any engine trouble but had to keep the radiator real clean or it would run hot. It still runs good but the clutch is stuck from sitting too long.

I never minded sitting down between the fenders. I was kept warmer on cold days. The best thing I ever did with it was rip that Full Vision cab off it. It was a real pain to get in with that on. Yes because of sitting down between those fenders.

My only real problem with it besides hydraulics was it should have had hydrostatic power steering and the optional hydraulic pump mounted behind the grill screen should have been standard equipment.

Oh and in our wet clay soil that we ran which wasn't tiled at the time, the D19 just couldn't get stuck. I mean, it would at times get stuck but if you dug down to the drawbar pin and unhooked the disk the D19 would crawl right out. I got good at doing that and kept a couple chains handy so I could drag the disk out from firmer ground.

From some accounts that I've read, allis got set back farther during WWII, then other manufacturers by building more war equipment, and then set back farther by a communist lead strike. If they could have gotten those years back, they would have been ahead of the pack. And in one of the books I've read, they had the D series already developed 10 years prior to its release, but due to financial crunch, couldn't get tooled up to mass produce it. So, instead, they worked with what they had, and released the WD. I think allis did all right, all things considered, and the final nail in their coffin was NOT due to an inferior product in the ag sector. Darrel

Not to mention the millions invested in a new method of extracting oil from shale

I don't think anybody on this thread has compared the breaks on this vintage of tractors.. I am an AC man, but no comparison in the breaks.  I had a 4020 gas power shift that must of had over 10,000 hours on the breaks with no problems..  The deere of coarse had a park on it that was sure better than trying to set the breaks if you had any on a 19.  The 4020 made more trips to the gas barrel than the AC.  8+ gal. per hour no matter what you were doing.

4020 brakes are in the rear axle inside the planetary reduction gears. Getting close requires removing the axle housing, not easy. It is crucial to always use JD approved transmission/hydraulic oil because some universal oils destroy the brake pads.

Gerald J.

JC(WI) wrote:  Just another tidbit of info on the JD PShift, Harold Brock, the designer of Ford's Select-o-Speed made the prototype and it was working pretty good, but not great in his opinion and told Ford to wait while he worked the bugs out of it and they did not listen. So, he left them and went to deere and told them he would design them a better powershift that would out perform Ford's design, he knew all the faults of that system so, he designed a new system and got the prototype out and was put into production. He did it out of spite against Ford. Heard it from a man that worked on Ford select-o-speeds for a living, then did it in his retirement... and was friends with the Harold. LOL. Found a link to the man. http://www.farmanddairy.com/columns/21291/21291.html

Thanks for posting the weblink to the article written about Harold Brock. I've read several interesting articles pertaining to Henry Ford and his Ford Motor Company. I especially enjoyed this one which has agricultural connections.