Hey everybody, Attached to this post is a picture of my Grandmother and Great Grandfather, taken around 1958 on our Family’s ranch in Paso Robles, CA. It can’t be ignored that there’s a Crawler sitting beautifully right behind them, and I’ve come up with no possible matches myself so far. My other great grandfather had many Crawlers on the ranch however documentation of these machines has been lost to time. The fuel tank placement seems identical to that of a Sixty but this is way too late, note the two exhaust pipes telling me there’s a pony. My guess is it might be an international Harvester but I’m really not sure. Any help would be greatly appreciated, Great Grandpa’s Crawlers are the only reason my family survived long enough for me to carry on the legacy, and I’m eager to find out as much as possible about them.

Looks like allis chalmers set up to burn butane or lpg? Maybe L or K or S, something like that. Mike

Hi, ReindeerHerder1066.
My guess would be an Allis Chalmers Model K set up for butane gas fuel. With the two exhaust pipes, it MAY have been a model KO prior to conversion. It's the two exhaust stacks that makes me think it could have been a KO.

The KO and LO were designed to run on diesel fuel but, from what I can gather, also had spark ignition built into them as part of their firing system. Both had multiple exhaust stacks, the KO with two and the LO with three.

Just my 0.02.

Agree. It is an Allis Chalmers L. The K's had a single exhaust stack. Look here.

Here's a KO.

I sent this picture to my A-C crawler collector buddy and his take on it was this:

Definitely an Allis-Chalmers, looks like a K because of the drawbar brackets and typical 6-bolt pattern on each side of the center “box” section where a PTO would mount. The twin exhaust stacks indicate it started life as a “KO” but because of engine problems most were converted to regular gasoline burning engines by the dealers, but retained the twin stacks. The fact that it has a propane fuel tank on the fender makes things even more interesting, as that was likely a second conversion done to the tractor, because factory propane options were a rare thing in that era.

Allis Chalmers K or KO. A good number of them running in the Paso Robles area in the 60's and even 70's. No idea what the difference in a K and KO was. My dad and uncle each had one and always said KO. The one still here say K on the radiator side plate. It has 2 exhausts yet, but I borrowed one muffler for something 40+ years ago. It was a good back up to the RD 6 Cat, not as big but close so could pull anything we had as tillage tools, but mainly on the grain drill.

The one here has a butane tank rather than propane and that was the last nail in putting down. Propane tanks are built to take a lot high pressure, and it was very hard to get butane by 67 or 68 when we parked it. A uncle retired and had a AC HD 5 he had the dealer do a major rebuilt to all of it not many hours before.


My dads brother had K he ran on diesel but sold it when I was 10 or so. It was the only one I know of running diesel all the rest where butane or propane.

www.tractordata.com/farm-tractors/003/0/...llis-chalmers-k.html

I had always heard of an AC "Diesel" with spark plugs - all I can recall at the moment - Engine was something Hesselman -
The "old timers" used to speak of AC with some not to kind wording - and those with the KO (Diesel) were ?? Hesselman Oil Burning SOB.

Propane (butane) in the 1920-1930- even into the later years was much less expensive than Gasoline. Slightly less power but they did modify some engines to increase compression.

CTS

Allis had a KO and an LO in those days, both based on the gasoline K and L tractors but the O stood for Oil Engine, and yes they were technically diesels but also had spark ignition because they were billed as being able to ignite heavier grades of oil than what regular diesel fuel was. They had a lot of problems though, partially due to their design and partially due to the really crude heavy fuels some people tried to run them on. A-C ended up offering a free retrofit to turn them into regular gasoline burning engines, basically a recall. The vast majority of KO and LO tractors ended up getting this done, so finding an intact Oil Engine tractor today is rare.

Google Hesselman - lots of results

Here is an AC pulling moldboard plow --
Enjoy

www.reddit.com/r/tractors/comments/30rfu...th_hesselman_diesel/