3 pieces of Interesting Iron selling this week

There’s a bunch of interesting iron crossing the block over the next week. At the end of the day, I couldn’t pick just one, so we’ll look at three of my favorites! Two orange ones in Kansas, and also a beautiful red one in Iowa!

1965 Allis Chalmers 616 Cotton Picker

It’s pretty rare to find an Allis Chalmers 616 Cotton Picker! This one lives in Kansas until next Tuesday, when it goes to a new owner!

If I had to guess, I’ll bet at least half of you had no idea that AC made a cotton picker! (And full disclosure... I didn’t either until a week or two ago when Mark Sullivan and I were talking about this auction!)

During the ’60s, there were essentially four major players in the cotton harvesting market: International Harvester, John Deere, John Rust/Ben Pearson, and Allis Chalmers. Plenty of other farm equipment companies had pickers and strippers, but those four were the big players. The only one that had a unique design was IH; the rest licensed designs and technology from John Rust/Ben Pearson (including AC).

John Rust developed the first mechanical cotton harvester in the 1930s. When he started building them, life in the Delta changed forever. In the mid-40s, Allis Chalmers licensed the designs and started building them in Gadsden, Alabama.

What you see here is one of the later models. It’s a two-row picker, and it essentially mounts on a D19 turned around backwards, with a D17 rear end. Very unique!

Evidently, these are fairly scarce. I talked to Josh VanTuyl, the farmer who owns it, and he tells me that it’s a 1965 model. Allis only built 30 that year, and this one is No. 25. He bought it from the original owner in Arkansas, and he suspects that it never actually picked very much cotton back in its working years. It had always been barn-kept, and it’s as original as the day is long! All original paint and everything! The toolbox even came with some NOS spindles and parts!

It sells at Josh & Rick VanTuyl’s sale on June 8 in Kansas, hosted by our friends at Sullivan Auctioneers. With five days left on the sale, bidding is at $1,200, but who knows where it’ll go? It’s definitely a piece of Interesting Iron in my book!