What to do, 2010 or 350???

[Lavoy]

I wonder if the G crawler you are hearing about is a GPO crawler. There were a couple dozen made give or take.
Lavoy

[NNAATZ]

it very well could have been, i herd about it though one of my jobbers that grew up around Waukon. he had seen it i guess and he knew it was not a BO because his uncle had one(a BO)
this was the first i heard of one, i'd belive it is pretty rare

[Lavoy]

There are either 11 or 13 left, and they are big bucks and then some. Last one I know of brought a shade past $100,000, a bargain at twice the price.
Lavoy

[NNAATZ]

i would belive that to

[Rex]

Hi Stan

I found your comments adout the 3010 and 4010 crawlers most interesting. Can you give those of us who never knew they existed, a quick discruption. ie ag or ind styling, how many rollers, 3pt hitch, rigid or oscillating track frame, pad size, fuel etc?
Thanks

Rex

[digitup]

The best thing to do with a 3010 is turn your back on it or scrap it and this coming from a guy that loves his Deeres [But I did buy a new Cat D5G in may to piss off the local Deere industrial salesman]. If I had that choice I would find a 450 series as they are more loader bu far . And if you look hard enough you should find 3010s a lot of them came to northern Ontario and they never started in the cold worth spit . Digitup.

[Stan Disbrow]

Hi,

The 3010 crawlers I saw were identical. They were both gas engines, painted green, so they were ag line. Both had 3-pt hitches and manually adjusted outside the track frame dozer blades. I can't recall any specifics about the tracks on them, other than they were there! It was long ago, you know.

They were mostly used for plowing wet fields, pushing stuff around, and unsticking stuck wheel tractors.

Stan

[Rex]

Thanks for the comments Stan.
It impresses me that you have been driving a crawler that the rest of us were unaware of.
From a historical point of view you have to be one of a very few world wide with first hand knowledge of them.

Rex

[Stan Disbrow]

Hi,

Yes, it does seem odd. I had never thought twice about the 3010 being rare. Heck, how can they be rare if the farm down the road had two of them?

Actually, my favorite was the third crawler they had. It was an ancient Cat D8 with cable blade. What a hoot that was for a kid to run! Just getting it started with the pony motor was a blast, and it would run down or yank anything.

One of these days, I'd like to get one just so I can sit and look at it, if nothing else.

Stan

[wwattson]

I guess I'm in the same camp as Lavoy on the 3010 crawlers. I can find pictures of the prototype but all my research failed to find any evidence that Deere ever built production versions. I hit up the guys over at Berco that had been working for Deere at the time and got a reply back from one of them that the wheeled version of the 3010 was the only one produced.

Stan, I'm sort of wondering if the machines you know of might have been some aftermarket crawler conversion using a Deere 3010. It is afterall how the BO Lindeman came into being. I just haven't been able to find any other explanation in that I can find no marketing materials, service information, or anyone from Deere in that time frame that knows it was built.

[Stan Disbrow]

Hi,

Yes, that's possible. I know that my uncle sold them to that farm, as we were the Deere dealer. Both he and dad have passed on, so I can't ask either of them any longer just what the story was with those.

It's also possible that they were part of a very small production run. If Deere formally annouced them and had orders on the books, then decided to kill the product, they'd have had to produce machines to fill the orders on hand by law.

I used to run into that when I was with IBM. We'd announce something, get a few orders in the first month, decide that the demand was not there and withdraw the product. We had to fill those few orders, though.

If Deere had made, say, six of the things would anyone still recall that?

Also, I wonder if they might have been test mules that had gone to that farm? I have no idea how that works, other than they do dole out some pre-series units for real-world testing.

Could they have been intended for sale in some other market? I recall my uncle getting six '1120' wheel tractors one time, yet there was no '1120' in the model lineup. They were overstock from the Canadian market, and he got some sort of real-deal on them somewhow.

Dang. This does bring up a lot of questions. I had never thought of any of this until last week! To me they were just old 3010 crawlers! I never gave them a second thought. Plus, I could have gone to the auction when the farm went out and maybe bought something rare and valuable for cheap! Dang it all, anyway.

What's worst is that I now have this burning desire to know just what it was they had that I used to drive around to yank out stuck tractors with! All I know now is that they were larger than a JD450 and had '3010' decals on the sides!

I suppose we'll have to presume that some other outfit somewhere was pulling the old Lindeman trick and sticking 3010 tractor parts onto a crawler chassis.

I sure wish I knew where at a least one of those things went to.

Stan

[Lavoy]

Along the same lines as Bill was mentioning as far as literature or such, any product that made it in to actual production would have literature or manuals of some sort associated with it. I have a couple thousand pages of literature, sales bulletins, factory service bulletins, etc, and there is no mention of a 3010 crawler. I have also seen a couple of crawler literature collections that make mine look quite small, and there was no reference of any sort in them either. My guess would be that it was 3010 decals and green paint put on a different model of crawler. Even at the time the 450 crawler came into production, the 3010 wheel tractor had been out of production for two years. The 550 crawler was not introduced until 1976 I believe, so there would not have been a Deere crawler larger than a 450 until then. By that time, the 3010 designation was 13 years old or more, so can't see them using it. Kind of interesting, would be great to see some pics if you could find them.
Lavoy

[Rex]

I find this discussion fasinating, its a lot like finding out that dads old tractor that he said was a AO converted to an AR because of the vertical exhaust was in fact an AOS - 1 of 2 that came to NZ and 1 of only 800 odd made.
Reading Digitup's post above though seems to suggest that

if you look hard enough you should find 3010s a lot of them came to northern Ontario and they never started in the cold worth spit

Just a thought, could a Canadian company have fitted them with tracks?

Rex

[Stan Disbrow]

Hi,

I never thought to take photos of anything back then. I was more interested in running the things.

I guess all we know for sure is that they were pretty old at the time, and we're talking 1975 here; they were painted Ag green and they were marked as 3010. Oh, and they were definately larger than the JD 450, but not by a whole lot. I recall seeing both side-by-each in the service shop.

They didn't look like the JD industrial machines, either. They had the same dash and tin on them as the New Generation ag tractors with various heavy guards protecting the nose, much like the old 420's have. They did have proper steering clutches, though. They didn't just use differential breaking like the old Allis and Oliver machines did. So, they weren't quite a simple as some of the old wheel tractor-to-track conversions I've seen. They had to have been done much like the Lindemann units were.

I wish I'd paid a bit more attention to them now. I was a teenager at the time, and they were just another machine to operate from time to time. I was the only kid that worked part-time on that farm that was allowed to drive the crawlers, though. That was because my dad was the crawler mechanic and he taught me how to run one. I wish he were still with us, as I know he'd know just what those things really were.

As we've chatted about this, I feel that they must have been some sort of aftermarket conversion, although up until this point in time I always thought of them as just another Deere Ag crawler. We were a Deere dealer, but we were also dealers for several other brands and handled forestry and industrial lines as well as Ag stuff. My uncle was well coneected, and if there was an outfit making 3010's into crawlers, you can rest assured that he'd have known about it - and bought some just to see what was up. He was always like a big kid, and loved his play-toys. Just like us, in other words!

Stan

[Lavoy]

You don't suppose any of your relatives or someone like that might have any photos?
Lavoy