Unstyled WC paint scheme

Contact Detwilers in Wisconsin.  If you are on Facebook, Pat Detwiler is the guy that does the wheel repair or I can find his email address for you.  Last time I looked into it, the 17" fronts were a little pricey to repair because Coker tire is the only place to buy rim blanks in that size.  Pat Detwiler can make the wheels look just like they came from the factory.  He can even take ones that have been cutdown to 16" back to the correct 17" rims.

Here is a one my brother james had and it had 28 inch rear spokes. And the big hub 5 bolt fronts. The fronts were very rusty but I do believe they had black paint but so hard to tell there was literally no paint it seemed left on them. I do know I have seen some 5 bolt hubs on an original 37 wc and they were orange.

Andy

jpessek wrote: Hard to see in my pic but mine matches that one, my serial number is 970:

Here's a picture of an original 17" WC front with remnants of F&H green.

All untouched, unstyled WC tractors used black.(with the exception of early GREEN wheeled tractors) Orange would have been ordered replacement stock that the DEALER painted to upgrade a steel wheeled tractor. Assembly line tractors were BLACK wheels, provided by F&H. In the case of Charlie Tuckers tractor, I would assume the orange he found on the back of the hub was due to installing a BLACK wheel on wet ORANGE paint at the factory!!

Edited by oldorangeiron - 21 Feb 2017 at 7:20am

CTuckerNWIL wrote:   Tractors from West Allis were painted Orange.  If a dealer had a steel wheeled tractor on the lot and a buyer wanted  rubber tires, the F&H rims could have been shipped to the dealer from F&H and be Black.  I would venture to say any change of wheels at the dealer  would have put Black rims on the tractor.

jpessek wrote: Fair enough,  but all the other pics in the brochure show black as well: download the complete brochure: http://www.mediafire.com/file/h5t56pq3m0z2fgi/1938wc.pdf EDIT: 37 was still black judging by the mecum auction original paint wc:

jpessek wrote: The 1938 WC Brochure still shows them with black rims:

The 1938 WC Brochure still shows them with black rims:

Is there any change to the hub characteristics on that drawing Randy?  There seems to be a change from the very early tractors with an HC46 hub to an HC46A hub that accommodates the inner wheel weight on the back side.  I would be interested in any other info on the drawing.

In regards to the wheel colors, F&H made wheels for almost every tractor manufacturer in the 1930's.  They generally painted all of their wheels a dark green color in their factory.  Some tractor companies would then paint over this base coat with their wheel color of choice.  The author of Original Allis Chalmers when doing research for the book had the change order right in front of him from the Agco archives that showed Allis specifying after April of 1934 that all F&H wheels for rubber tires would be painted black instead of dark green.  F&H also sold their wheels to aftermarket suppliers and these would have been dark green so if a farmer decided to buy a set of wheels from his local tire shop, that's the color they would have been.  A vast majority of the WC rears that I have seen have black paint on them.

Gentlemen,  Please remember that Allis-Chalmers made the WC as an ecenomical unit. That said, it means that Allis Chalmers Painted in the cheapest way.  That meant that everyting was painted PO#1.  However, in some instances when the rear wheels and tires were supplied by after market sources and since they were already sufficiently painted they were not re-painted.

The '37s had dish rear wheels, and they were orange I'm pretty sure.

Unit3 wrote: We have two catalogs from AC in 1935 and 1937. Both show that tractors with rubber tires had black spoke wheels and steel wheel tractors were orange.