Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1545857
I'll tell you a story of my interest in Allis- Chalmers. I have a collection of 10 tractors. A Farmall M is my biggest, plus a handful of Ford 9N's, 2N's and 8N's and two Fergusons. The only Allis-Chalmers product is a shop-built 1940 Chevy truck with a WC rear-end drive doodlebug. I belonged to a deer-hunting club in New York's southern Adirondacks. The City of Utica had watershed land there. One of our members at one time owned an Oldsmobile dealership in Utica. Somehow, he had some pull in Utica politics. He managed to get us permission to build a hunting camp on this property. There is an old logging road that runs about 7 miles toward Jerseyfield Lake. Our camp is 4 miles in. When the camp was built, they used horses and wagons, tractors, Dad's Model A doodlebug and anything that would roll and move to get the material in there back in the 1950s. The ATV's as we know them weren't around yet; everyone had to build their own. Our club needed more doodlebugs. Two senior founding members of our club were good handymen. One operated a dairy farm and the other had a welding and repair shop. They got wind of another farmer who had a bunch of Allis tractors in various states of disrepair and wanted to clean his place up. These two brothers bought it all and brought it all to the shop. On the one brother's farm was a 1940 Chevy pickup. They put one of the WC Allis differentials on the back of this Chevy, added a big truck front end with bigger wheels and built this Chevy/Allis doodlebug. I can remember riding on it at 6 years old. The club used it for another 20-plus years until the City of Utica sold this land to the State. Of the rest of these ill-repaired tractors, they got two running. One was made into another doodlebug, while the other was sold. Another club saw our Chevy doodlebug and thought it was a hoot. The shop owner (George) told them he had two more frames and rear ends. He told them if they could come up with a couple of old Chevy trucks, he could build them a couple. This other club started into the wood the same place we did but 7 miles in a different direction, so in the end, there were three Chevy/Allis doodlebugs in existence. The one we used was probably the best doodlebug we had. It had the spoked back wheels with tractor tires. One time, old George got it stuck in the mud. With the truck's four-speed transmission and tractor rear end, it was geared down pretty good. He cut a fairly straight maple limb long enough to run through the spokes of both wheels. He put the truck in first gear and the wheels pulled this stick through the mud and moved the doodlebug out of its difficulty. The tractor gave us backwoods experiences, as well. One such experience was on the first weekend of hunting season when we loaded our gear onto the tractor. Once we got it running, we discovered the clutch wouldn't release. The club president said, "Put it in second gear and hand crank start it. It will take a little longer to get to camp, but we'll make it. In the meantime, maybe we can get the clutch to release." There was a tree down across the road about three- fourths of the way in. The driver thought he could run over the lower end of it. The front wheel wouldn't roll over it and the tractor wanted to climb the tree. The only thing to do was kill the ignition. We ended up cutting the tree the rest of the way down. This we always referred to as the time we had to cut the tractor out of the tree. In the end, the city sold the land to the State. Not long afterward, our club disbanded. I've got, to this day, the Chevy/Allis doodlebug, and George's nephew got the tractor doodlebug. The Chevy/Allis doodlebug By James Dieffenbacher, Little Falls, N.Y. The 17th annual G Roundup drew some 137 tractors (including a G with airplane engine) and visitors from several states to the city park in Hokes Bluff, Ala., last October. This year's show will be Oct. 9-10. The Allis-Chalmers G was produced in Gadsden, Ala. The annual show is hosted by the Weiss Lake Antique Power Association and sponsored by Steiner Tractor and Snead Tractor, among others. Photo at left by Sarah Penny Ryan, granddaughter of organizer Robert Wood, Piedmont, Ala. G Roundup set to convene this fall 27 OLD ALLIS NEWS