Chamberlain (tractor)
Chamberlain was an Australian tractor brand and market leader there for several years . Even after the company John Deere took over the manufacturer in the mid-1970s , the name continued to be used for a few years.
The company was founded in 1947 by AW Chamberlain and his two sons. The first eleven tractors were not built until two years later. They were equipped with a 2-cylinder engine that ran on kerosene after attempts with diesel engines had failed. There were versions with 40 and 45 hp . The first diesel tractor was the 60 DA , available from 1952 , which was powered by a 3-cylinder engine from General Motors . Engines from this manufacturer were installed in Chamberlain tractors until 1976. In the mid-1950s, a smaller and cheaper tractor with a Perkins engine and a self-made 3-speed gearbox was built next to it . Over 20,000 of these were sold during the twenty-year production period.
Compared to European or American companies, Chamberlain was a rather small manufacturer with a production capacity of three thousand tractors per year. Even so, the company grew from sales of 7.6 million Australian dollars to 19.3 million Australian dollars in the 1960s alone.
At the end of the 1960s, the Countryman, the first 100 hp tractor, was brought onto the market.
In 1970, John Deere bought a 49 percent stake in Chamberlain, only to take over the entire company a few years later. From 1975 John Deere engines produced in Saran (France) were installed in all models from 68 HP to 119 HP . From 1982 there was a new production series with larger models. In 1986 Chamberlain tractors were stopped and the factories only produced agricultural equipment.
literature
- Jim Glastonbury: Tractors - Technical marvels . Regency House Publishing Limited, 2003, ISBN 3-89736-324-0 .
