6 and 8000 series cab question

Did Allis build their own cabs towards the end? Just did a Racine CIH plant tour and learned the same company builds for multiple brands.

Did part of the Allis engineering crew end up at McLaughlin?

I think all the Deere cabs we built at Crenlo had Deere serial numbers put on them too. I say I think. I never paid that much attention to it.

victoryallis wrote: Did Crenlo make the cabs for the 7000 series Deere’s.

Not while I was there. January 1995 thru October 1997.

It was interesting when I got moved over to the New Holland cab line about every 8 or 10 cabs, give or take, that came through were Cat row crop cabs built just like the New Holland cab sharing the exact same frame and many other parts but instead of having two doors the Cat cabs only had one door. Then there were Terracotta (kind of a burnt orange color) New Holland cabs that came through every so often. I think those cabs went to Europe. Just before I left they ran a few prototype New Holland CR combine cabs through. They were huge. I didn't get to work on those.

While I'm reminiscing I remember when it came close to contract negotiation time and a very weak threat of a strike from the union, the months prior we were working tons of overtime and pumping out 32 cabs every day from the New Holland line and no one questioned it. We found out later after the new contract that Crenlo was warehousing all these Deere, Cat and New Holland cabs so they could weather a short strike if need be. There was a lot of dead time after that and I got farmed over to spot welding for several weeks. Hated that, extremely boring running a foot pedal and setting weld nuts on sheet metal...... and you couldn't wear a watch as the stray voltage would stop any watch.

Another note, sometimes there were messed up cabs that got by the inspectors and were sent to Cat or Deere. Crenlo would then ask for voluteers to go down to Peoria, or Waterloo or Dubuque to rework the cabs or they were sent back to Crenlo.

Cat went on strike at some point and that really hurt business at Crenlo as the line came to a halt but Crenlo didn't lay anyone off and I did a lot of floor sweeping and let me tell you it didn't matter if that floor had been swept 3 times that day and that there was nothing to sweep as there was no activity, you swept anyway because if you stopped for even 1 minute to chat with another sweeper the supervisor was all over your butt right now. But sometimes another supervisor would walk over to me to talk politics and then I had no worries. He was a Republican and at the time I was a, gulp, Democrat.


Edited by Lonn - 15 Feb 2018 at 8:01am

DrAllis wrote: I thought all 6000-7000-8000 and Gleaner cabs were made in LaPorte.

Maybe so. But I did look at pics of the 6000 series cabs in a book at Crenlo. They were pics of the tractor with that cab on them. Could be it was something they put a bid on and never got for all I know. I just assumed they built at least some of them. The paint line supervisor said they had built cabs for several companies over the years. I wonder if the Genesis cabs of that time period all have a Crenlo tag on them or just New Holland? At any rate I think some of the tooling for cabs was brought in from Deere or whoever but there were engineers always working on changes. The engineering department was centrally located in the plant and I was farmed in over there for a couple weeks just helping setting up tooling and moving heavy items for them. The next time I see the retired engineer that I still know, I'm going to ask him some of these questions. He lives just down the road from me.

victoryallis wrote: I’m 99% that they have aCrenlo tag in them.

Interesting read about Crenlo cabs. I found this link to their website page where you can watch a video showing their cab productions. Once on this page, just scroll down it. The video is right below the cute “looking over her left shoulder” brunette (not an Australia Brian pic). Sorry no AC cabs though.
https://www.crenlo.com/cab/

Edited by AC7060IL - 16 Mar 2019 at 3:50am

My Gleaner has a LaPorte tag in the cab.  I have seen some other F/K/G gleaners that had a different factory cab that had a fiberglass roof not sure who made those.  


Edited by VAfarmboy - 17 Mar 2019 at 10:40am