Redman - 4/22/2009 16:55

The pieces of pure genius that I have experienced on the farm never came anywhere near a B.E.- no offence to engineers. The engineers are only brought in AFTER to fix up poor ideas or cover off liability issues.

Do you expect that we would have 4wd tractors today if the Steiger brothers or Pakosh and Robinson had had engineering degrees? The Versatile and Steiger brands were born out of a perceived need and how to go about filling it. They both recognized that all the parts were out there on the shelf, it just required putting them in a different configuration than ever before.

Look what resulted when the Majors went into the business. How many fondly remember the Case 1200, the White AFT-1400 or the Massey 1500? Even mother Deere had to infringe on intellectual property and recompense the Wagners when they came to put a unit on the market- and it took Deere the better part of a generation to build a decent 4wd- the 8960's and 8970's which they promptly began to treat as a bastard child because they didn't use one of Deere's failure prone engines. There is a fine old cartoon of a child's swing that best emphasizes what happens when the concept is beyond the designer and the builder imagination.

Killbery wrote the book on swathers, Gysler taught the world ( including the Frigstad boys) how to build a cultivator and the Honey Brothers maybe didn't teach the world to sing but they taught them what a draper header should be.

All wonderful machines- all elegant in the classical meaning of the word- and all vastly superior to knock offs engineered by the majors.

And we all know the restrictions engineers are faced with - and the biggest one is that they are forced to use inferior component "a" because it is manufactured in house. Component "b", both better and cheaper is verbotten because it does not have managements 's seal of approval.