#John Deere D Plow Day

[uniqueartisanconnoisseur]

John Deere D Plow Day, Come Rain or Shine

John Deere D Plow Day, Come Rain or Shine

July 23, 2022, on a whim we headed to Nappanee, Indiana. As part of Classic Green’s John Deere D Centennial Celebration in 2023, yesterday, they planned to have an all-John Deere D plow day.  I checked in with Mike Ostrander and he said the plans were on and to come on out! Indiana Bound Somehow, I had missed this event on my Antique Tractor Calendar 2022. Earlier in the day we made…

[royalalbertamuseumblog]

Museum Professions - Conservator

All this week we have been celebrating #MuseumWeek: an international online event celebrating and showcasing all things from cultural institutions over 7 days, 7 themes, 7 hashtags. Today’s theme is “professions”, so we thought we’d take this opportunity to ask some of our lovely staff here at the RAM a couple questions about their careers, what some of the coolest projects they’ve worked on here, and their favourite museum (other than the RAM of course!).

Lisa May, Conservator (Objects)

What you do at the RAM?

At the RAM I do a variety of tasks, no day is usually the same, which keeps life interesting! In the broad scope, I provide preservation, conservation and remedial conservation treatment (when required) for the artifacts and specimens in the collection. I do written/photographic documentation to capture the condition of objects to be sure we can track any future concerns. I work alongside curators and exhibit staff to prepare objects going on exhibit; providing assistance with mount designs to properly support objects while on display. 

I assist in developing and training staff/volunteers on procedures to process artifacts/specimens and integrate them into the larger museum collection. Recently I have started to test a variety of materials to record their possible damaging effects on artifacts; gathering all the results in a database for the RAM to utilize in the future.

Coolest project you’ve worked on during your time at the RAM?

During the renewal process, I was able to work on a few artifacts on loan from the Reynolds Alberta Museum. I really enjoyed working on the 1927 John Deere Model D tractor and the 1945 International Harvester plow for a variety of reasons. The plow was stored outside and required invasive treatment (sandblasting) and then a protective wax coating was applied overall. This was a group effort with my colleague Ally Tang as well as Queen’s University intern Mikaela Marchuk. It’s always exciting to see dramatic results and work collaboratively with others. The John Deere tractor was also a collaborative effort. I worked with Reynolds Museum staff Wayne Schultz for draining fluid and preparing the tractor for long-term display as well as with curator Randy Kvill to locate period lugs to add to the steel wheels to complete the overall original look.

Mikaela Marchuk working on the plow  

When did you decide to pursue this career path? Why did you peruse this career path?

After completing my Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2001 and deciding not to pursue a Masters of Fine Arts, I was working at an art gallery I met the conservator on staff. Having a strong connection with historic architecture through my artwork and large-scale vintage mechanical objects, I wanted to learn more about how and why materials degraded and how to stop the process to allow future generations to enjoy these structures and objects as much as I do. The next year I started my conservation schooling at Fleming College in Peterbourgh, ON.

What’s your favourite museum other than the RAM?

Having a passion for large-scale and mechanical objects one of my favourite museums is the Science Museum, London. Being able to watch and run the mechanics of the large-scale objects I find fascinating. Locally, I always enjoy the Reynolds Alberta Museum and the collaborations I have been able to pursue with them. However, another local Alberta gem I discovered a couple of years ago is the Smithson International Truck Museum which is one of the PasKaPoo Park Historical Museums.

[punkpoemprose]

A Brief History of the Farm; Or Why Emily is the Way She Is

As requested, a brief (okay it got really really long) history of life, adventures, and my/ my family member’s fuckups on the farm.

@karis-the-fangirl I hope some of this is helpful/ amusing. Feel free to ask questions at any time if you’d like. If living in the sticks can be helpful to anyone I’m more than happy to share the knowledge I have.

So my dad has like the longest list of insane stories related to farmwork, so a lot of these will be his, and I should say that my family farm is only a hobby farm, so the work is a lot less difficult than my cousin’s dairy farm and the farms around me. We’re more of a subsistence farm/ homestead.

           When my dad was in middle school/ highschool he worked on my cousin’s dairy farm, and nearly died there five times that I know of (there’s probably more).

1.)    In the hayloft and a board broke out from under him sending him to the floor below (about a 10ft drop), which would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that the weak board sent him into a pile of very sharp tools that should have probably impaled him. He walked it off.

2.)    Was switching off equipment because he heard a storm was rolling in. The first strike of lightning in the whole night hits the barn, comes through the outlet, and knocks him flat on his ass, gasping for breath.

3.)    Was digging a trench for waterlines out to the barn. His little cousin was playing with her sisters in the back yard and went running, fell into the trench and straight on top of my father (she wasn’t necessarily small at that age and it was a 12ft trench). She nearly broke my Dad’s back, but it was lucky that she landed on him, because if she hadn’t, she likely would have hit a stone at the bottom of the trench and died.

4.)    Rolled a tractor (you’re not supposed to live through that), and not like a John Deere Mt or a little Ford or something, no, a huge commercial farm tractor with no cab. Again, he went flying, but walked it off.

5.)    Some kid decided to walk up to the back of one of the tractors when a PTO (power take off- basically a thing that spins wicked fast that you can use to power equipment off the back of a tractor, like a mower or what have you… this might explain better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_take-off) shaft was running. If you so much as touch one of those babies when they’re going it can break your arm/ leg. God forbid you get a scrap of clothing stuck in there, you’re as good as dead. Anyway, kid gets too close, my Dad sees what’s about to happen and shoves the kid out of the way. You can probably guess what happens to Dad’s pants. If it weren’t for the fact that Dad yelled for the kid to move and the kid screamed, which caused my Great Grandfather to come running and shut the tractor off, I probably wouldn’t be here today. Oh, and what happened to him? He walked it off.

Mom wasn’t born on the farm. She was a city gal. Okay so like not a big city, but they had more than one grocery store, so that’s a city for me. My town only has farms, car garages, a post office, a town hall, and the general store an Amish lady opened up about a year ago (the pie is so damn good and her prices are so low it’s a miracle I bake at all anymore tbh, my grandmother has definitely given in all her thanksgiving pies were handmade by Laura Yoder and her three girls).

When she first started seeing Dad she was about my age (I think around 19 or 20?). They met at her summer job (at a plastic plant out towards Utica). My dad was her supervisor, and even though she had never done farm chores before, she started to learn on her visits. My father lived with his grandfather and the house desperately needed a woman’s touch, so Mom often did the dishes and tidied up for them, and she learned to crochet during the winter just to make my Dad a blanket.

By the time they were married Mom felt much more comfortable on the farm, but let me tell you (as she would, she’s a lovely woman and likes others to learn from her mistakes) she made some major mess ups/ had some adventures before and after the wedding.

She ruined about three weeks worth of green beans by weeding the row while they were wet (when you touch green beans while they’re wet they “rust” which is basically a disease/ blight that ruins the beans on the affected plants).

Planted three different plants that are so terribly invasive we’ve done everything we can to kill them since the early 2000’s and they still keep coming back (word to the wise if you ever want to plant spearmint do it in a pot).

Somehow Virginia Creeper ended up in our grape vines, and thankfully Mom only ate one berry (they look a lot like wild grapes). It lit her whole mouth on fire, and luckily she and dad were able to tear it all out before anyone else made the same mistake.

She didn’t fully cook Swiss Chard and had a similar adventure in mouth/ throat burning (The plants have tiny microneedles in their stems that will make you feel pain like no other if you eat it raw/ undercooked).

Once she made a pie with the apples off the back tree, and somehow managed to get several worm filled apples which did not reveal themselves until dinner that night, dead in the pie. In similar bug/ apple tree issues she accidently sent a wasps nest out of the tree and onto my father while picking apples (though Dad got his revenge when I was a kid and sent a chuck of beehive onto her by accident).

She was pulling weeds in the garden, accidently dug up/ pulled out a snake and panicked, not letting go of it, but running so that the poor thing (just a little garter snake mind you) was bouncing up and down the whole time, probably just trying to be free of her. She only dropped it when she ran over to my father (who’s terrified of snakes) and he smacked her hand.

When she was pregnant with me, she and Dad hadn’t accounted for such a cold/ long winter, so in the middle of February (7 months pregnant), she was up in the woods filling up a sled (that didn’t hold much but was heavy when full) with wood to bring back to the house. She had to make this trip 3-5 times in a day, and the woods are a quarter mile from the house in any direction.

When I was a toddler and my brother was a baby she worked in the garden with him in a playpen and I would be playing with my toy garden tools. My cousin, unfortunately, had planted a cornfield in the lot behind my house that he rented from us that year and I toddled off into the corn field. My poor mother ran through the corn field barefoot with my brother in one arm, screaming like a banshee for a good fifteen minutes. By the time she got back to the house, ready to call in a search party, I was being pushed on my swing set by my great grandpa (who was very hard of hearing).

My Gramp was the sweetest/ toughest man you would ever meet and doted on my brother and I terribly. He was half deaf, blind in one eye, his heart barely worked, he had a bad back and barely functioning lungs, but he would go up into the woods on the hottest day of summer to pick wild blackberries, strawberries, and raspberries for me and my brother. When Conner was a baby and I was a toddler he would do it for hours, come back, mash them all up for us with some sugar, let us eat it all, and tell us stories. My dad always said that he wouldn’t have lived as long as he did if it weren’t for me and my brother being around to give him something to live for.

As far as my experiences go I’ve been lucky to avoid anything too possibly life ending. Though we cut our own wood, and when I was a kid my Dad would fall a tree and cut it up and me, my mom, and my brother would load it into the truck or the wagon to take back to the house. Well my favorite thing was when he’d fall a tree on a hill so that we could roll the blocks down the hill to be split/ loaded. One time my shirt got caught on a log I was rolling, and it took me with it. I thankfully got thrown off the block before it could roll on my chest, but it got my leg pretty bad and it knocked all the air out of my lungs. I was pretty young at the time so my parents were worried. They made me and my brother stay in the truck the rest of the time, but we really just wanted to be out rolling more blocks. Also I’ve been hit multiple times by thrown pieces of wood to varying levels of damage to myself. I accidently broke my dad’s glasses when I didn’t see him and tossed a piece at him when I was about 12. But he was mostly fine and my brother broke a window doing the same thing when we were filling a shed, so we’ve all done something.

We use a tractor to plow out the driveway in the winter because we get so much snow. When my brother was a baby he loved riding on the tractor with Dad. (He called it a put-put because that’s the sound the exhaust/ exhaust cap makes when it runs). One time my dad hit a snow bank pretty hard and my little brother (probably about 2 or 3) went flying off the tractor and into the bank. I’m about 4 or 5, so I’m just sort of confused when my dad plucks my brother out of the snow and grabs us both (amazing given how puffy both of our snowsuits were really) and says the one phrase the three of us still share today “Don’t tell mom!”

When my brother and I were up playing on the edge of where the field meets the woods (where my great grandma used to throw the trash because they didn’t have pick up or anything like that) I sliced my finger open on a piece of glass and my brother said I’d have to get stitches so I tried hiding it from my mom for hours. I don’t know how much blood I lost, but my mom (God bless her) found out and managed to butterfly bandage it closed and made me drink a ridiculous amount of water. I probably should have gone to the hospital, but it never scarred and I lived. I have other stories that did leave scars, but I can sum almost all of them up as “young Emily really liked animals but the animals didn’t always like Emily back”. I didn’t learn obviously, I’m a Biologist.

When I started being able to do chores on my own I got my shoe eaten by pigs while bringing them slop, accidently pulled out all the plants and left the weeds in the garden because the leaves were very similar (thankfully we were able to replant them), I accidently broke a ton of eggs, I lost most of the hay out of a bale I was carrying, I ripped open a feed bag because I held it wrong, and I fell into what I will affectionately refer to as “puckey” more times than I’m willing to admit. I also freed all the fish my brother caught (because they were cute), cried over a bird that my brother shot by accident while trying to scare them out of the tomatoes, and with detached emotion named my three pigs breakfast, lunch, and dinner (my brother, who really isn’t a monster I promise, named his bacon, ham, and sausage).

I refuse to hunt, but I’ve gutted deer (the first time was an adventure trust me there), and for the last year I’ve been the closest thing my family had to a farm vet. The vet most people used around here passed recently and evidently a student of biology with a firm understanding of google is good enough for my family when it comes to the chickens and wildlife. I’ve only lost one patient and consulting with my actual vet student friends, she wasn’t going to make it anyway.

Also critters get into the house a lot and because I’m the only one in the family who isn’t afraid of them (mostly mice, bats, moles, and the occasional bird, my mom can handle the frogs/ toads/ salamanders herself), it’s been my job since I was about 12 to shoo them out. I don’t do snakes (because while I respect them I’m afraid of them), but I’ve been known to catch spiders and bring them out to the deck. The only thing I would ever outright refuse to catch is this fucking massive squirrel that used to hang out in the hay loft of my friend’s barn. It was a terror.

Oh and my brother and I had our hair chewed on by a horse when we were kids because we used to have straw blonde hair.

I overfilled a pressure canner once and I nearly died when we opened it prematurely because it blew the pressure gage clear off the top and just past my head.

My dog ran across a wet bridge and sent my cousin into the creek below where he broke his arm. I had to run back to the house (about a half mile) to get my mom to call his mom so we could bring him to the hospital (I was about 13, so he was either 14 or 15).

My brother and I have pulled more stone out of the fields around my house than I can count. Not little ones either. You can run little ones over with the tractor. I’m talking rocks the size of a laptop or larger. Once or twice we’ve found ones so big that we needed my dad to come through with the tractor to get them out.

I’ve been face to face with a bear (which is why I bring my brother, our 4-wheeler and his rifle whenever I go blackberry picking now), and we’ve all had deer, coyote, porcupines, skunks, and snakes cross our paths. Dad tries to shoot all the woodchucks out of the lot (they cause a lot of damage), but I won’t let him kill them if I’m around (same for the moles in the lawn and the field mice in the house).

There’s like a million more things I could say, but this is over 2500 words and I think I should stop now.  

[thebayeuxtapestry-medievalworld]

Depicted above: coronation of Harold as King of England

The Bayeux Tapestry is the most famous piece of English embroidery. Through complete luck the tapestry has survived for almost 1000 years. With nothing but needle, thread, and a linen background, the Bayeux Tapestry tells the story of the Norman conquest of England. The Tapestry boasts 626 human figures, 190 horses or mules, 35 hounds or dogs, 506 other animals, 37 ships, 33 buildings, and 37 trees or groups of trees.[1] But what makes the Tapestry so powerful is its function as both a Latin cartoon and a well written piece of Medieval Latin text.

The Tapestry was commissioned in 1067 by Bishop Odo of Bayeux, half-brother to William the Conqueror, and was believed to have been hung in the Bayeux Cathedral, but this seems unlikely due to its secular nature and its sheer size. More likely, the Tapestry was kept in Odo’s hall, and hung in the nave of the cathedral for feast days and other special occasions.[2] Because of the brief period between the events of the Norman conquest of England and the Tapestry’s production, it is considered an accurate documentation of events.

The earliest written record of the Tapestry is from 1476 in an inventory of the treasury of Bayeux Cathedral.[3] It escaped the iconoclastic efforts of the French Huguenots in the sixteenth century, and it was not until the early eighteenth century when it was first properly identified by Dom Bernard du Montfaucon, a Benedictine scholar, in 1729-30, in his Les Monuments de la Monarchie française. Sometime in the eighteenth century, the traditional belief that the Tapestry was created by Queen Matilda as a gift for William, her husband, began to appear.[4] In 1792, the Tapestry was confiscated as public property and was to have been used to cover military wagons were it not for the intervention of a Bayeux lawyer named Léonard Leforestier. It was briefly displayed in the Louvre early in 1804, and after this it was returned to the people of Bayeux who made it available for scholarly study. During the Second World War, it was briefly being evacuated to the Louvre, and since February 1983, it has been on display in the seventeenth-century Old Seminary, now a part of the Bayeux Municipal Library.[5]

The story of the Tapestry begins with King Edward I of England sending Harold, the Earl of Wessex, to Normandy, most likely to reaffirm a promise that Edward had made to William, then Duke of Normandy, that William would succeed Edward to the English throne.[6] Later, upon Edward’s death, Harold seizes the crown, denying William what he believes is his rightful crown. In response, William invades England with his Norman fleet, and defeats Harold at the Battle of Hastings, fought on October 14, 1066. The Tapestry ends with the English army fleeing the battle, but the Tapestry appears to have lost two sections. These sections most likely depicted the coronation of William as King William I, the first of the Norman kings of England.

[1] Charles H. Gibbs-Smith, The Bayeux Tapestry (New York: Phaidon, 1973), 6-7 .

[2] Ibid, 5.

[3] John D. Anderson, “The Bayeux Tapestry: A 900-Year Old Latin Cartoon”, The Classical Journal 81 (1986): 253 – 257. Accessed Feb. 11, 2017. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3297235

[4] Richard Rex, trans., The Bayeux Tapestry (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2005), 14.

[5] Ibid, 15-16.

[6] Gibbs-Smith, Bayeux Tapestry, 10.

Depicted in order of appearance: (1) Norman preparations for an invasion of England; (2 & 3) Normans sailing for England; (4) detail of Battle of Hastings; (5) death of King Harold during Battle of Hastings

The politics of the Tapestry are biased, as it was commissioned by a Norman.[1] The Tapestry, while meant to commemorate William’s triumph, also functions as propaganda, providing justification for William’s invasion of England, beginning with the broken promise of the English crown.[2] One of the strongest arguments for this theory can be found in the border of the Tapestry, with the portrayal of many of Aesop’s fables. Fables were an important Medieval genre of literature, and their use in the Tapestry creates discursive meaning.[3] For example, the greatest concentration of the fables appear during Harold’s journey to and while in Normandy. The fables portrayed all center around themes of treachery, greed, betrayal, and trickery. When the Norman perspective of the Tapestry is considered, these themes heavily present around Harold provide more evidence for the Tapestry’s purpose as propaganda. The Tapestry was produced in such a way as to make it easy to transport and display publicly.[4] Additionally, the portrayal of Aesop’s fables requires a familiarity with the stories of the fables to understand their full impact, indicating the original audience of the Tapestry to be elite and noble members of Norman society, who would have had the education to recognize their meaning. It was these noblemen and women who would have been greatly concerned and been the most upset by William’s invasion of England.[5]

These powerful connotations seem very odd to have been found in an art form, but the Tapestry’s use of Latin inscriptions also verifies its status as a textual document. The use of Latin also provides an interesting window into the politics of the time following the Norman conquest in England, as the use of Latin is a sudden, marked change from the use of the Anglo-Saxon vernacular in English art and literature that had been encouraged under King Alfred the Great.[6] Perhaps this could have been a request of the Tapestry’s Norman patron, but regardless of the reason, it is still a marked departure from the status quo of English art and literature.

The Tapestry is remarkable in its incorporation of everyday Medieval life alongside the epic tale of the Norman conquest. The scene depicting the Norman preparations for the invasion show the array of weaponry and armor that were utilized during the Medieval period. There is a portrayal of a farmer plowing his field with a mule while another uses a slingshot to scare off a bird. Later, the Tapestry shows a baker during the feast of the Normans before the Battle of Hastings. The detail of the armor on the soldiers during the Battle of Hastings provides an accurate image of what armor worn then was like and how it functioned. The scene of William’s army feasting before the battle shows what common foods were on campaign during this time. Whether intentional or not, the Tapestry provides a window into the culture and society of Medieval Europe.

[1] “The Bayeux Tapestry”, Dr. Kristine Tanton, accessed Feb. 8, 2017, https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/early-europe-and-colonial-americas/medieval-europe-islamic-world/a/bayeux-tapestry

[2] Suzanne Lewis, The Rhetoric of Power in the Bayeux Tapestry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

Depicted in order of appearance: (1) baker baking before Battle of Hastings; (2) deer hunt; (3) farmers plowing and sowing field; (4) Normans feasting before Battle of Hastings; (5) close-up view of armor and weapons worn by English forces; (6) Norman preparations for invasion, showing different weapons and armor worn

The golden age of English pictorial art ran from around the year 966 to 1066.[1] English needlework and embroidery was prized throughout Europe. Historians believe that the Tapestry was produced by people in the monastic life, specifically from St. Augustine’s monastery in Canterbury, which can be supported when comparing the style of images from the Tapestry to the style of images found in manuscripts from the same period at the monastery.[2] Experts believe that the Tapestry was produced by teams of embroiderers and took approximately two years to complete. The Tapestry is designed as multiple pieces of linen with specific scenes portrayed. These smaller pieces of linen would have been produced separately and then stitched together to create the final product.

The Tapestry is a combination of two popular styles employed by English embroiderers. The “Utrecht” style, based off the famed Utrecht Psalter, which has elegantly written Latin inscriptions of psalms accompanied with stunning illustrations. The Winchester style, so named because of its association with the so-called Winchester School, had three distinct characteristics. First, Winchester style had an overwhelmingly profuse use of gold and heavy colors to create an incredibly lavish visual. Second, the artists using Winchester style were just as concerned with the overall decorative effects as they were with the story itself. Third, the surrounding frame was not only an enclosure, but an integral part of the composition. The Bayeux Tapestry itself has five distinct stylistic features. First, the Tapestry has a pervasive naturalism, liveliness, and lightness of spirit. Second, there is a great fondness for decorative patterns. Third, the Tapestry’s style of embroidery is a combination of the Utrecht and Winchester styles discussed earlier. Fourth, the borders of the tapestry play various roles as the story of the Tapestry progresses. Finally, the distinctive use of a continuous, sequential narrative arranged on a peculiarly shaped textile set the Tapestry apart from other embroideries that have been produced.[3]

The Tapestry’s background is a white linen. The embroideries are of wool thread in eight different colors, adding to the aesthetic prowess of the Tapestry. The colors were achieved through a variety of resources, mostly mineral based or plant based dyes and pigments. The main style of embroidery used is laid and couched work. This style of stitching is most effective and efficient when large areas need to be covered, so this style is found mostly on people, buildings, and other large areas of color.[4] Surrounding these larger areas, embroiderers employed stem and outline stitches, usually in black or a darker color to give definition to the figures. These darker colors also contrast starkly with the bright, white linen background.[5] The style of the Tapestry is quite unique, making it difficult to compare it to similar works. First, the Tapestry portrays a secular subject. Second, the technique that the embroidery is worked in is sufficiently distinctive from that of other embroideries from this time. Third, the Tapestry’s long, narrow form is unusual.[6] The Tapestry’s survival to modern times is, by far, its most unique feature, as there are no similar pieces that have survived to modern times. Any surviving embroideries are usually horribly neglected fragments that have deteriorated and faded over time, and the Tapestry’s survival as a full piece (except for the two missing pieces from the end) sets it apart.

The Bayeux Tapestry, while not truly a tapestry, has survived for nearly 1000 years, through the French Revolution, both World Wars, and countless other conflicts. Today, it is visited by millions, experts and simple tourists alike, and its splendor captivates all. Its position as a direct source and commentary on both the Norman conquest of England and everyday Medieval life is a marvel. And the Tapestry’s double function as an artistic feat and a historical text only add to its merit and magnificence.

[1] David J. Bernstein, The Mystery of the Bayeux Tapestry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 60-70.

[2] Ibid, 60-70.

[3] Ibid, 70.

[4] Sir Frank Steton et al., The Bayeux Tapestry (London: Phaidon Press, 1957), 40.

[5] Ibid, 41.

[6] Ibid, 48.

[jesusvasser]

John Deere 1050K: The Ultimate Building Machine

DUBUQUE, Iowa — This must be what it feels like to be God. I’m 8 feet off the ground, atop 94,000 pounds of shuddering steel, massive push beams the size of tree trunks holding aloft a towering, 13-foot-wide blade that’s advancing in front of me with the grim, relentless cadence of Caesar’s Roman army laying siege. Below, tracks more than 11 feet long on either side churn into the dirt as the rig’s 13.5-liter diesel throbs and bellows with 1,162 lb-ft of torque. Up ahead, I can almost see the massive mound of earth in our path begin to wince.

This is the John Deere 1050K crawler dozer—what city boys like me call a bulldozer—the largest and most powerful the company has ever built, a yellow-and-black Optimus Prime capable, it seems to me, of busting right through the Great Wall of China. Ten minutes ago, I’d never been in a crawler before. Now I’m seated inside the 1050K’s windowed cab, piloting this snorting behemoth alone. If I forget how to make it stop, I might just plow straight through to the Great Wall after all.

Let’s do Launch: On his first-ever dozer drive, St. Antoine aims the mighty Deere skyward—mostly because he doesn’t know how not to.

You would think a machine so brutish would require a crew of whip-snapping lion tamers to manage. But no. Despite the ease with which it can transform anything in its path into a Belgian waffle, the 1050K is a pussycat. Steering and speed are controlled with an intuitive joystick and a small thumb switch. A set-and-forget power-management system automatically maintains optimum engine rpm. A hydrostatic transmission (essentially a continuously variable tranny that requires no gear changing by the operator) means I’m able to manage the monster’s pace with one hand. The airy cab is heated, air-conditioned, and outfitted with an iPod-ready audio system. If I were so inclined, I could effortlessly bash the nearby maintenance building into rubble while simultaneously relaxing to Franz Liszt’s “Liebesträume No. 3 in A Major.” And on top of it all, the 1050K looks less like an ungainly construction implement and more like a piece of modern sculpture.

“Because of their work in automotive, Designworks is highlighting areas where we can bring in new materials. We’ve now got plastic roof lines, plastic handholds that allow us to bring together complex shapes without a lot of expense.”

For that, the folks at John Deere in part can thank their colleagues at BMW Designworks.

John Deere never lived to see a tractor with his name on it. It was 1837 when the blacksmith from Grand Detour, Illinois, invented the self-scouring steel plow that would revolutionize the farming industry. (Prior to Deere’s innovation, wooden or iron plows had to be stopped regularly and cleared of muck.) It wasn’t until 1912, after John and his son and business partner, Charles, were both dead, that Deere & Company president William Butterworth made the decision that would make the John Deere name famous worldwide: The brand began building tractors. By 1923, Deere had unveiled its legendary Model D, a two-cylinder design that would remain in production for an incredible 30 years.

The cab of a 1050K is no NASA clean room, but there’s plenty of high tech on hand. Steering and speed are controlled via joysticks, while a hydrostatic transmission manages gear changes.

In those early days, a tractor’s appearance meant nothing. Not to tractor makers. Not to buyers. Indeed, most tractors were of the “unstyled” variety, their various mechanical components hanging out like the frog you dissected in high school. But by the late 1930s, in an effort to differentiate themselves, tractor companies began to design their wares. Some, such as Ford, employed in-house stylists. Deere went a different way. In 1937, the company turned to renowned New York City industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss. By then Dreyfuss was already an acknowledged virtuoso, a human-factors pioneer who had fashioned everything from streamlined locomotives to the iconic Western Electric “I Love Lucy” 302 Bakelite telephone. He’d never even seen a tractor before, but Dreyfuss was so taken by the notion of working on one, it’s said that he jumped on a train to the Deere factory—then in Waterloo, Iowa—the same night.

Playing Dirty: In mere minutes the author discovers that rich Iowa farmland is no match for 94,000 pounds of thundering Deere.

Dreyfuss-designed tractors first appeared in 1938. He streamlined the much-beloved Model A (Deere’s first tractor with adjustable wheel treads) by enclosing the previously open fan shaft and adding a grille around the radiator. “For more than 80 years now, we’ve had some level of industrial design in our products,” says Gordon Miller, director of construction engineering at Deere’s Construction and Forestry Division. “It’s more than just the mechanical side. It even extends to Deere’s green-and-yellow paint scheme, which is known globally.”

Since 1995, though, John Deere’s products have taken shape in concert with a decidedly different associate: BMW Designworks. American designer Chuck Pelly founded the studio in California in 1972, and it proved so successful that by 1995 Germany’s BMW Group had wholly acquired it. Based in Newbury Park, California, Designworks also boasts studios in Munich and Shanghai. Clients include such diverse brands as Coca-Cola, Dassault Aviation, and Mercury Marine. And, of course, John Deere. “Interestingly, Chuck Pelly used to work for Dreyfuss,” says Stephen Chadwick, director of global operations for Designworks (who wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the aerodynamic properties of tennis balls). “So even way back, Pelly was helping John Deere out.”

The Deere/Designworks relationship bloomed from the start. “In the mid-’90s we were engaged on a new development, the H Series crawler,” says Doug Meyer, global director of construction engineering for Deere’s Construction and Forestry Division. “And one thing that’s always a struggle for us in construction is that we have various machine forms—from a backhoe to a skid-steer loader to a crawler—and to bring them all together somehow is a real challenge. So to give them all a similar language, a recognizable look and feel, we connected with Designworks.”

John the Ripper: Looking more like a tank than a construction implement, the Deere 1050K dozer is just as fearsome at the back as it is at the front.

The H Series was a milestone for us because it was the first crawler on the market with a hydrostatic transmission,” Miller says. To help get it right, Deere and Designworks turned to customer-advocate groups—lots and lots of focus groups. “We always engage the customer throughout the entire development process—from initial sketches to foamcore cabin mock-ups to early prototypes,” Meyer says. “We even let them experience prototypes at their job sites. From where an operator wants to store their lunch box to the joystick location to how the doors open, it’s all on the table. Sometimes, based on what our customers say, we have to do a lot of work over again.”

Yet it’s never as simple as building what the customer wants. “Whether the customer admits it or not,” Chadwick explains, “how a product looks plays a big part in their purchase decision. It’s the same with construction equipment as it is with automobiles. The emotional side. I can remember a designer once coming up to me and saying, ‘We’re done. This thing does everything we wanted it do to.’ And I laughed and said, ‘Yep, but it doesn’t look very good.’ It’s amazing. We might just break apart a few lines, blend a few surfaces. Sometimes it doesn’t cost us an extra cent. But the machine has to have good industrial design.”

The machine doesn’t just have to look good, it’s also got to look right. Brett Bedard, Deere’s manager of marketing communications, says, “A machine can be fully capable, but if it doesn’t look strong enough, the customer will ding it. They’ll say, ‘This one looks beefier.’ And you can counter with, ‘Well, ours will push more dirt.’ But if it doesn’t look like it can, the customer will say, ‘Well, I’m not buying it.’” Chadwick agrees: “We can identify from the outset how the machine form should look. Then we can test that with the customers, get the buy-in from them. It’s a constant validation process, making course corrections along the way.”

Meyer highlights another benefit of having Designworks on board: the studio’s automotive expertise. “Because of their work in automotive, Designworks is constantly highlighting areas where we can bring in new materials they’ve worked with, such as plastics. We’ve now got plastic roof lines, plastic handholds that allow us to bring together complex shapes without a lot of expense. Their designers see things in other industries and bring them into ours.”

Tonka toy heaven!

Designworks apparently did its part on the H Series, because the crawler was a hit. And in the two-plus decades since, the studio’s involvement has grown to include Deere’s entire spectrum of construction and forestry products. Indeed, Designworks is now considered “a strategic, enterprise-level supplier”— aka a partner. Today, the studio’s design influence has permeated the entire Deere product range. “For crawlers at least, we want angles that give a ‘moving forward’ look,” says Tim Post, engineering manager on crawlers. “It’s cues like the sloping hoodline. The roofline. The console layout and the color scheme. If you stand and look at our crawlers, the language carries through all the way from the 450 to the 1050—and into other product lines, too. Even from a distance, you can say, ‘That’s a Deere.’”

Designworks is now considered “a strategic, enterprise-level supplier,” aka a partner.

To see where Deere and Designworks are headed next, Robert Moore, engineering manager on backhoes, takes me out into the field to check out a model 410L, Deere’s second-largest backhoe. “You’ve got a loader bucket on the front and an excavator—or backhoe—at the rear,” Moore says. “But the thing is, the traditional backhoe form hasn’t changed much since the 1950s. It’s a tractor-based platform, and that’s always been a limitation.”

For a few minutes, I play around with the 410L, first scooping up dirt with the front bucket and then flipping the seat around to dig a deep hole with the excavator. Tonka toy heaven! I could do this all day. But Moore has other plans. He motions me to jump out of the cab and then hands me the newest product-development tool for Deere and Designworks: a pair of virtual reality goggles. I slip on the headset, and suddenly I’m looking 10 years into the future. There, “standing” before me where the 410L used to be, is a concept for a next-gen Deere backhoe: the so-called Fixstern. German for “fixed star,” fixstern is a word adopted by BMW to denote its pioneering design process (eyes fixed on a distant star). As applied to a backhoe, Fixstern basically means “wasn’t this thing in ‘Avatar’?”

“With VR, we’re able to sit together—engineers, designers, marketing people—and all see exactly what we’re building.

After switching the VR goggles to cockpit view, my hands grasp wildly at thin air as I attempt to “touch” the Fixstern’s controls. “We’re no longer constrained by having a tractor base,” Moore says. “The Fixstern is 20 percent lighter—thanks to emerging materials—has far better interior spaciousness and visibility, and features a hybrid powertrain for efficiency. With VR, you’re able to ‘see’ just what an operator would see from the driver’s seat. Notice the Fixstern’s backhoe. We’ve created a double-jointed mechanism that allows us to pivot the arm left or right of center. Right now the arm is on the right, giving you excellent visibility to the trench in front of you. In the 410L, the center-mounted arm blocks the trench.” Moore is correct. The Fixstern’s view to my “construction site” is vastly improved.

What a VR headset wearer “sees” from inside the Fixstern backhoe concept. (Note an enhanced view of the trench thanks to a pivoted arm.)

“With VR, we’re able to sit together in a conference room—engineers, designers, marketing people—and all see exactly what we’re building, discuss changes, where are we going to get this part. It’s revolutionary,” Moore says. Then he laughs. “Imagine me, Mr. Pocket Protector. In meetings I used to have to draw this stuff!”

For the past 20 minutes I’ve been charging the 1050K crawler into a massive mound of dirt, gouging out Cadillac Escalade-sized loads with the front bucket, then dumping them into another pile nearby. And by this point my new dirt pile has grown to a sizable mountain of its own. After making a final deposit into my dirt bank, suddenly I realize the 1050K and I are straddling the top of the mound. I’m staring almost straight up into the sky, the blade poised to dig into the clouds, the whole 47-ton leviathan practically teetering atop my pile’s summit. Do I back up? Go forward? I scramble around the cockpit. Surely there has to be an ejection switch in here. But no, I’m on my own.

Engineering manager Robert Moore, right, explains the vision that’s soon to become a reality.

I make the decision to go forward. I ease the 1050K ahead, gingerly, slowly … when suddenly the beast dives over the top, almost falls, and then with a thundering ka-blam, blade and tank tracks and mammoth diesel engine come crashing back to earth. Incredibly, the 1050K shakes it off as if this were business as usual. Me? I feel like a skydiver who’s just returned to Earth without a parachute.

As I step down from the cab, one of the 1050K’s attendants walks over and slaps one of the crawler’s treads. “Nice work!” he says with a laugh. “I’ve never seen this big ol’ boy do that!”

I smile back. But inside I’m thinking, “Well, duh. This Deere’s got BMW in it.”

The post John Deere 1050K: The Ultimate Building Machine appeared first on Automobile Magazine.

from Performance Junk WP Feed 4 http://ift.tt/2ibFekb via IFTTT

[eddiejpoplar]

John Deere 1050K: The Ultimate Building Machine

DUBUQUE, Iowa — This must be what it feels like to be God. I’m 8 feet off the ground, atop 94,000 pounds of shuddering steel, massive push beams the size of tree trunks holding aloft a towering, 13-foot-wide blade that’s advancing in front of me with the grim, relentless cadence of Caesar’s Roman army laying siege. Below, tracks more than 11 feet long on either side churn into the dirt as the rig’s 13.5-liter diesel throbs and bellows with 1,162 lb-ft of torque. Up ahead, I can almost see the massive mound of earth in our path begin to wince.

This is the John Deere 1050K crawler dozer—what city boys like me call a bulldozer—the largest and most powerful the company has ever built, a yellow-and-black Optimus Prime capable, it seems to me, of busting right through the Great Wall of China. Ten minutes ago, I’d never been in a crawler before. Now I’m seated inside the 1050K’s windowed cab, piloting this snorting behemoth alone. If I forget how to make it stop, I might just plow straight through to the Great Wall after all.

Let’s do Launch: On his first-ever dozer drive, St. Antoine aims the mighty Deere skyward—mostly because he doesn’t know how not to.

You would think a machine so brutish would require a crew of whip-snapping lion tamers to manage. But no. Despite the ease with which it can transform anything in its path into a Belgian waffle, the 1050K is a pussycat. Steering and speed are controlled with an intuitive joystick and a small thumb switch. A set-and-forget power-management system automatically maintains optimum engine rpm. A hydrostatic transmission (essentially a continuously variable tranny that requires no gear changing by the operator) means I’m able to manage the monster’s pace with one hand. The airy cab is heated, air-conditioned, and outfitted with an iPod-ready audio system. If I were so inclined, I could effortlessly bash the nearby maintenance building into rubble while simultaneously relaxing to Franz Liszt’s “Liebesträume No. 3 in A Major.” And on top of it all, the 1050K looks less like an ungainly construction implement and more like a piece of modern sculpture.

“Because of their work in automotive, Designworks is highlighting areas where we can bring in new materials. We’ve now got plastic roof lines, plastic handholds that allow us to bring together complex shapes without a lot of expense.”

For that, the folks at John Deere in part can thank their colleagues at BMW Designworks.

John Deere never lived to see a tractor with his name on it. It was 1837 when the blacksmith from Grand Detour, Illinois, invented the self-scouring steel plow that would revolutionize the farming industry. (Prior to Deere’s innovation, wooden or iron plows had to be stopped regularly and cleared of muck.) It wasn’t until 1912, after John and his son and business partner, Charles, were both dead, that Deere & Company president William Butterworth made the decision that would make the John Deere name famous worldwide: The brand began building tractors. By 1923, Deere had unveiled its legendary Model D, a two-cylinder design that would remain in production for an incredible 30 years.

The cab of a 1050K is no NASA clean room, but there’s plenty of high tech on hand. Steering and speed are controlled via joysticks, while a hydrostatic transmission manages gear changes.

In those early days, a tractor’s appearance meant nothing. Not to tractor makers. Not to buyers. Indeed, most tractors were of the “unstyled” variety, their various mechanical components hanging out like the frog you dissected in high school. But by the late 1930s, in an effort to differentiate themselves, tractor companies began to design their wares. Some, such as Ford, employed in-house stylists. Deere went a different way. In 1937, the company turned to renowned New York City industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss. By then Dreyfuss was already an acknowledged virtuoso, a human-factors pioneer who had fashioned everything from streamlined locomotives to the iconic Western Electric “I Love Lucy” 302 Bakelite telephone. He’d never even seen a tractor before, but Dreyfuss was so taken by the notion of working on one, it’s said that he jumped on a train to the Deere factory—then in Waterloo, Iowa—the same night.

Playing Dirty: In mere minutes the author discovers that rich Iowa farmland is no match for 94,000 pounds of thundering Deere.

Dreyfuss-designed tractors first appeared in 1938. He streamlined the much-beloved Model A (Deere’s first tractor with adjustable wheel treads) by enclosing the previously open fan shaft and adding a grille around the radiator. “For more than 80 years now, we’ve had some level of industrial design in our products,” says Gordon Miller, director of construction engineering at Deere’s Construction and Forestry Division. “It’s more than just the mechanical side. It even extends to Deere’s green-and-yellow paint scheme, which is known globally.”

Since 1995, though, John Deere’s products have taken shape in concert with a decidedly different associate: BMW Designworks. American designer Chuck Pelly founded the studio in California in 1972, and it proved so successful that by 1995 Germany’s BMW Group had wholly acquired it. Based in Newbury Park, California, Designworks also boasts studios in Munich and Shanghai. Clients include such diverse brands as Coca-Cola, Dassault Aviation, and Mercury Marine. And, of course, John Deere. “Interestingly, Chuck Pelly used to work for Dreyfuss,” says Stephen Chadwick, director of global operations for Designworks (who wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the aerodynamic properties of tennis balls). “So even way back, Pelly was helping John Deere out.”

The Deere/Designworks relationship bloomed from the start. “In the mid-’90s we were engaged on a new development, the H Series crawler,” says Doug Meyer, global director of construction engineering for Deere’s Construction and Forestry Division. “And one thing that’s always a struggle for us in construction is that we have various machine forms—from a backhoe to a skid-steer loader to a crawler—and to bring them all together somehow is a real challenge. So to give them all a similar language, a recognizable look and feel, we connected with Designworks.”

John the Ripper: Looking more like a tank than a construction implement, the Deere 1050K dozer is just as fearsome at the back as it is at the front.

The H Series was a milestone for us because it was the first crawler on the market with a hydrostatic transmission,” Miller says. To help get it right, Deere and Designworks turned to customer-advocate groups—lots and lots of focus groups. “We always engage the customer throughout the entire development process—from initial sketches to foamcore cabin mock-ups to early prototypes,” Meyer says. “We even let them experience prototypes at their job sites. From where an operator wants to store their lunch box to the joystick location to how the doors open, it’s all on the table. Sometimes, based on what our customers say, we have to do a lot of work over again.”

Yet it’s never as simple as building what the customer wants. “Whether the customer admits it or not,” Chadwick explains, “how a product looks plays a big part in their purchase decision. It’s the same with construction equipment as it is with automobiles. The emotional side. I can remember a designer once coming up to me and saying, ‘We’re done. This thing does everything we wanted it do to.’ And I laughed and said, ‘Yep, but it doesn’t look very good.’ It’s amazing. We might just break apart a few lines, blend a few surfaces. Sometimes it doesn’t cost us an extra cent. But the machine has to have good industrial design.”

The machine doesn’t just have to look good, it’s also got to look right. Brett Bedard, Deere’s manager of marketing communications, says, “A machine can be fully capable, but if it doesn’t look strong enough, the customer will ding it. They’ll say, ‘This one looks beefier.’ And you can counter with, ‘Well, ours will push more dirt.’ But if it doesn’t look like it can, the customer will say, ‘Well, I’m not buying it.’” Chadwick agrees: “We can identify from the outset how the machine form should look. Then we can test that with the customers, get the buy-in from them. It’s a constant validation process, making course corrections along the way.”

Meyer highlights another benefit of having Designworks on board: the studio’s automotive expertise. “Because of their work in automotive, Designworks is constantly highlighting areas where we can bring in new materials they’ve worked with, such as plastics. We’ve now got plastic roof lines, plastic handholds that allow us to bring together complex shapes without a lot of expense. Their designers see things in other industries and bring them into ours.”

Tonka toy heaven!

Designworks apparently did its part on the H Series, because the crawler was a hit. And in the two-plus decades since, the studio’s involvement has grown to include Deere’s entire spectrum of construction and forestry products. Indeed, Designworks is now considered “a strategic, enterprise-level supplier”— aka a partner. Today, the studio’s design influence has permeated the entire Deere product range. “For crawlers at least, we want angles that give a ‘moving forward’ look,” says Tim Post, engineering manager on crawlers. “It’s cues like the sloping hoodline. The roofline. The console layout and the color scheme. If you stand and look at our crawlers, the language carries through all the way from the 450 to the 1050—and into other product lines, too. Even from a distance, you can say, ‘That’s a Deere.’”

Designworks is now considered “a strategic, enterprise-level supplier,” aka a partner.

To see where Deere and Designworks are headed next, Robert Moore, engineering manager on backhoes, takes me out into the field to check out a model 410L, Deere’s second-largest backhoe. “You’ve got a loader bucket on the front and an excavator—or backhoe—at the rear,” Moore says. “But the thing is, the traditional backhoe form hasn’t changed much since the 1950s. It’s a tractor-based platform, and that’s always been a limitation.”

For a few minutes, I play around with the 410L, first scooping up dirt with the front bucket and then flipping the seat around to dig a deep hole with the excavator. Tonka toy heaven! I could do this all day. But Moore has other plans. He motions me to jump out of the cab and then hands me the newest product-development tool for Deere and Designworks: a pair of virtual reality goggles. I slip on the headset, and suddenly I’m looking 10 years into the future. There, “standing” before me where the 410L used to be, is a concept for a next-gen Deere backhoe: the so-called Fixstern. German for “fixed star,” fixstern is a word adopted by BMW to denote its pioneering design process (eyes fixed on a distant star). As applied to a backhoe, Fixstern basically means “wasn’t this thing in ‘Avatar’?”

“With VR, we’re able to sit together—engineers, designers, marketing people—and all see exactly what we’re building.

After switching the VR goggles to cockpit view, my hands grasp wildly at thin air as I attempt to “touch” the Fixstern’s controls. “We’re no longer constrained by having a tractor base,” Moore says. “The Fixstern is 20 percent lighter—thanks to emerging materials—has far better interior spaciousness and visibility, and features a hybrid powertrain for efficiency. With VR, you’re able to ‘see’ just what an operator would see from the driver’s seat. Notice the Fixstern’s backhoe. We’ve created a double-jointed mechanism that allows us to pivot the arm left or right of center. Right now the arm is on the right, giving you excellent visibility to the trench in front of you. In the 410L, the center-mounted arm blocks the trench.” Moore is correct. The Fixstern’s view to my “construction site” is vastly improved.

What a VR headset wearer “sees” from inside the Fixstern backhoe concept. (Note an enhanced view of the trench thanks to a pivoted arm.)

“With VR, we’re able to sit together in a conference room—engineers, designers, marketing people—and all see exactly what we’re building, discuss changes, where are we going to get this part. It’s revolutionary,” Moore says. Then he laughs. “Imagine me, Mr. Pocket Protector. In meetings I used to have to draw this stuff!”

For the past 20 minutes I’ve been charging the 1050K crawler into a massive mound of dirt, gouging out Cadillac Escalade-sized loads with the front bucket, then dumping them into another pile nearby. And by this point my new dirt pile has grown to a sizable mountain of its own. After making a final deposit into my dirt bank, suddenly I realize the 1050K and I are straddling the top of the mound. I’m staring almost straight up into the sky, the blade poised to dig into the clouds, the whole 47-ton leviathan practically teetering atop my pile’s summit. Do I back up? Go forward? I scramble around the cockpit. Surely there has to be an ejection switch in here. But no, I’m on my own.

Engineering manager Robert Moore, right, explains the vision that’s soon to become a reality.

I make the decision to go forward. I ease the 1050K ahead, gingerly, slowly … when suddenly the beast dives over the top, almost falls, and then with a thundering ka-blam, blade and tank tracks and mammoth diesel engine come crashing back to earth. Incredibly, the 1050K shakes it off as if this were business as usual. Me? I feel like a skydiver who’s just returned to Earth without a parachute.

As I step down from the cab, one of the 1050K’s attendants walks over and slaps one of the crawler’s treads. “Nice work!” he says with a laugh. “I’ve never seen this big ol’ boy do that!”

I smile back. But inside I’m thinking, “Well, duh. This Deere’s got BMW in it.”

The post John Deere 1050K: The Ultimate Building Machine appeared first on Automobile Magazine.

from Performance Junk Blogger 6 http://ift.tt/2ibFekb via IFTTT

[jonathanbelloblog]

John Deere 1050K: The Ultimate Building Machine

DUBUQUE, Iowa — This must be what it feels like to be God. I’m 8 feet off the ground, atop 94,000 pounds of shuddering steel, massive push beams the size of tree trunks holding aloft a towering, 13-foot-wide blade that’s advancing in front of me with the grim, relentless cadence of Caesar’s Roman army laying siege. Below, tracks more than 11 feet long on either side churn into the dirt as the rig’s 13.5-liter diesel throbs and bellows with 1,162 lb-ft of torque. Up ahead, I can almost see the massive mound of earth in our path begin to wince.

This is the John Deere 1050K crawler dozer—what city boys like me call a bulldozer—the largest and most powerful the company has ever built, a yellow-and-black Optimus Prime capable, it seems to me, of busting right through the Great Wall of China. Ten minutes ago, I’d never been in a crawler before. Now I’m seated inside the 1050K’s windowed cab, piloting this snorting behemoth alone. If I forget how to make it stop, I might just plow straight through to the Great Wall after all.

Let’s do Launch: On his first-ever dozer drive, St. Antoine aims the mighty Deere skyward—mostly because he doesn’t know how not to.

You would think a machine so brutish would require a crew of whip-snapping lion tamers to manage. But no. Despite the ease with which it can transform anything in its path into a Belgian waffle, the 1050K is a pussycat. Steering and speed are controlled with an intuitive joystick and a small thumb switch. A set-and-forget power-management system automatically maintains optimum engine rpm. A hydrostatic transmission (essentially a continuously variable tranny that requires no gear changing by the operator) means I’m able to manage the monster’s pace with one hand. The airy cab is heated, air-conditioned, and outfitted with an iPod-ready audio system. If I were so inclined, I could effortlessly bash the nearby maintenance building into rubble while simultaneously relaxing to Franz Liszt’s “Liebesträume No. 3 in A Major.” And on top of it all, the 1050K looks less like an ungainly construction implement and more like a piece of modern sculpture.

“Because of their work in automotive, Designworks is highlighting areas where we can bring in new materials. We’ve now got plastic roof lines, plastic handholds that allow us to bring together complex shapes without a lot of expense.”

For that, the folks at John Deere in part can thank their colleagues at BMW Designworks.

John Deere never lived to see a tractor with his name on it. It was 1837 when the blacksmith from Grand Detour, Illinois, invented the self-scouring steel plow that would revolutionize the farming industry. (Prior to Deere’s innovation, wooden or iron plows had to be stopped regularly and cleared of muck.) It wasn’t until 1912, after John and his son and business partner, Charles, were both dead, that Deere & Company president William Butterworth made the decision that would make the John Deere name famous worldwide: The brand began building tractors. By 1923, Deere had unveiled its legendary Model D, a two-cylinder design that would remain in production for an incredible 30 years.

The cab of a 1050K is no NASA clean room, but there’s plenty of high tech on hand. Steering and speed are controlled via joysticks, while a hydrostatic transmission manages gear changes.

In those early days, a tractor’s appearance meant nothing. Not to tractor makers. Not to buyers. Indeed, most tractors were of the “unstyled” variety, their various mechanical components hanging out like the frog you dissected in high school. But by the late 1930s, in an effort to differentiate themselves, tractor companies began to design their wares. Some, such as Ford, employed in-house stylists. Deere went a different way. In 1937, the company turned to renowned New York City industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss. By then Dreyfuss was already an acknowledged virtuoso, a human-factors pioneer who had fashioned everything from streamlined locomotives to the iconic Western Electric “I Love Lucy” 302 Bakelite telephone. He’d never even seen a tractor before, but Dreyfuss was so taken by the notion of working on one, it’s said that he jumped on a train to the Deere factory—then in Waterloo, Iowa—the same night.

Playing Dirty: In mere minutes the author discovers that rich Iowa farmland is no match for 94,000 pounds of thundering Deere.

Dreyfuss-designed tractors first appeared in 1938. He streamlined the much-beloved Model A (Deere’s first tractor with adjustable wheel treads) by enclosing the previously open fan shaft and adding a grille around the radiator. “For more than 80 years now, we’ve had some level of industrial design in our products,” says Gordon Miller, director of construction engineering at Deere’s Construction and Forestry Division. “It’s more than just the mechanical side. It even extends to Deere’s green-and-yellow paint scheme, which is known globally.”

Since 1995, though, John Deere’s products have taken shape in concert with a decidedly different associate: BMW Designworks. American designer Chuck Pelly founded the studio in California in 1972, and it proved so successful that by 1995 Germany’s BMW Group had wholly acquired it. Based in Newbury Park, California, Designworks also boasts studios in Munich and Shanghai. Clients include such diverse brands as Coca-Cola, Dassault Aviation, and Mercury Marine. And, of course, John Deere. “Interestingly, Chuck Pelly used to work for Dreyfuss,” says Stephen Chadwick, director of global operations for Designworks (who wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the aerodynamic properties of tennis balls). “So even way back, Pelly was helping John Deere out.”

The Deere/Designworks relationship bloomed from the start. “In the mid-’90s we were engaged on a new development, the H Series crawler,” says Doug Meyer, global director of construction engineering for Deere’s Construction and Forestry Division. “And one thing that’s always a struggle for us in construction is that we have various machine forms—from a backhoe to a skid-steer loader to a crawler—and to bring them all together somehow is a real challenge. So to give them all a similar language, a recognizable look and feel, we connected with Designworks.”

John the Ripper: Looking more like a tank than a construction implement, the Deere 1050K dozer is just as fearsome at the back as it is at the front.

The H Series was a milestone for us because it was the first crawler on the market with a hydrostatic transmission,” Miller says. To help get it right, Deere and Designworks turned to customer-advocate groups—lots and lots of focus groups. “We always engage the customer throughout the entire development process—from initial sketches to foamcore cabin mock-ups to early prototypes,” Meyer says. “We even let them experience prototypes at their job sites. From where an operator wants to store their lunch box to the joystick location to how the doors open, it’s all on the table. Sometimes, based on what our customers say, we have to do a lot of work over again.”

Yet it’s never as simple as building what the customer wants. “Whether the customer admits it or not,” Chadwick explains, “how a product looks plays a big part in their purchase decision. It’s the same with construction equipment as it is with automobiles. The emotional side. I can remember a designer once coming up to me and saying, ‘We’re done. This thing does everything we wanted it do to.’ And I laughed and said, ‘Yep, but it doesn’t look very good.’ It’s amazing. We might just break apart a few lines, blend a few surfaces. Sometimes it doesn’t cost us an extra cent. But the machine has to have good industrial design.”

The machine doesn’t just have to look good, it’s also got to look right. Brett Bedard, Deere’s manager of marketing communications, says, “A machine can be fully capable, but if it doesn’t look strong enough, the customer will ding it. They’ll say, ‘This one looks beefier.’ And you can counter with, ‘Well, ours will push more dirt.’ But if it doesn’t look like it can, the customer will say, ‘Well, I’m not buying it.’” Chadwick agrees: “We can identify from the outset how the machine form should look. Then we can test that with the customers, get the buy-in from them. It’s a constant validation process, making course corrections along the way.”

Meyer highlights another benefit of having Designworks on board: the studio’s automotive expertise. “Because of their work in automotive, Designworks is constantly highlighting areas where we can bring in new materials they’ve worked with, such as plastics. We’ve now got plastic roof lines, plastic handholds that allow us to bring together complex shapes without a lot of expense. Their designers see things in other industries and bring them into ours.”

Tonka toy heaven!

Designworks apparently did its part on the H Series, because the crawler was a hit. And in the two-plus decades since, the studio’s involvement has grown to include Deere’s entire spectrum of construction and forestry products. Indeed, Designworks is now considered “a strategic, enterprise-level supplier”— aka a partner. Today, the studio’s design influence has permeated the entire Deere product range. “For crawlers at least, we want angles that give a ‘moving forward’ look,” says Tim Post, engineering manager on crawlers. “It’s cues like the sloping hoodline. The roofline. The console layout and the color scheme. If you stand and look at our crawlers, the language carries through all the way from the 450 to the 1050—and into other product lines, too. Even from a distance, you can say, ‘That’s a Deere.’”

Designworks is now considered “a strategic, enterprise-level supplier,” aka a partner.

To see where Deere and Designworks are headed next, Robert Moore, engineering manager on backhoes, takes me out into the field to check out a model 410L, Deere’s second-largest backhoe. “You’ve got a loader bucket on the front and an excavator—or backhoe—at the rear,” Moore says. “But the thing is, the traditional backhoe form hasn’t changed much since the 1950s. It’s a tractor-based platform, and that’s always been a limitation.”

For a few minutes, I play around with the 410L, first scooping up dirt with the front bucket and then flipping the seat around to dig a deep hole with the excavator. Tonka toy heaven! I could do this all day. But Moore has other plans. He motions me to jump out of the cab and then hands me the newest product-development tool for Deere and Designworks: a pair of virtual reality goggles. I slip on the headset, and suddenly I’m looking 10 years into the future. There, “standing” before me where the 410L used to be, is a concept for a next-gen Deere backhoe: the so-called Fixstern. German for “fixed star,” fixstern is a word adopted by BMW to denote its pioneering design process (eyes fixed on a distant star). As applied to a backhoe, Fixstern basically means “wasn’t this thing in ‘Avatar’?”

“With VR, we’re able to sit together—engineers, designers, marketing people—and all see exactly what we’re building.

After switching the VR goggles to cockpit view, my hands grasp wildly at thin air as I attempt to “touch” the Fixstern’s controls. “We’re no longer constrained by having a tractor base,” Moore says. “The Fixstern is 20 percent lighter—thanks to emerging materials—has far better interior spaciousness and visibility, and features a hybrid powertrain for efficiency. With VR, you’re able to ‘see’ just what an operator would see from the driver’s seat. Notice the Fixstern’s backhoe. We’ve created a double-jointed mechanism that allows us to pivot the arm left or right of center. Right now the arm is on the right, giving you excellent visibility to the trench in front of you. In the 410L, the center-mounted arm blocks the trench.” Moore is correct. The Fixstern’s view to my “construction site” is vastly improved.

What a VR headset wearer “sees” from inside the Fixstern backhoe concept. (Note an enhanced view of the trench thanks to a pivoted arm.)

“With VR, we’re able to sit together in a conference room—engineers, designers, marketing people—and all see exactly what we’re building, discuss changes, where are we going to get this part. It’s revolutionary,” Moore says. Then he laughs. “Imagine me, Mr. Pocket Protector. In meetings I used to have to draw this stuff!”

For the past 20 minutes I’ve been charging the 1050K crawler into a massive mound of dirt, gouging out Cadillac Escalade-sized loads with the front bucket, then dumping them into another pile nearby. And by this point my new dirt pile has grown to a sizable mountain of its own. After making a final deposit into my dirt bank, suddenly I realize the 1050K and I are straddling the top of the mound. I’m staring almost straight up into the sky, the blade poised to dig into the clouds, the whole 47-ton leviathan practically teetering atop my pile’s summit. Do I back up? Go forward? I scramble around the cockpit. Surely there has to be an ejection switch in here. But no, I’m on my own.

Engineering manager Robert Moore, right, explains the vision that’s soon to become a reality.

I make the decision to go forward. I ease the 1050K ahead, gingerly, slowly … when suddenly the beast dives over the top, almost falls, and then with a thundering ka-blam, blade and tank tracks and mammoth diesel engine come crashing back to earth. Incredibly, the 1050K shakes it off as if this were business as usual. Me? I feel like a skydiver who’s just returned to Earth without a parachute.

As I step down from the cab, one of the 1050K’s attendants walks over and slaps one of the crawler’s treads. “Nice work!” he says with a laugh. “I’ve never seen this big ol’ boy do that!”

I smile back. But inside I’m thinking, “Well, duh. This Deere’s got BMW in it.”

The post John Deere 1050K: The Ultimate Building Machine appeared first on Automobile Magazine.

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Manufacturers Go Pink to Support Breast Cancer Awareness Month: This Week’s Industry News

Want to keep up with the latest news in lawn care and landscaping? Check back every Thursday for a quick recap of recent happenings in the green industry.

Fisher Engineering, SnowEx Go Pink to Support Breast Cancer Awareness Month Fisher Engineering announces the support of Breast Cancer Awareness month in partnership with SnowEx. During the month of October, Fisher is running a special promotion featuring limited edition pink FISHERXV2 v-plows and pink lift arm kits. Fisher will donate $100 from the sale of each pink XV2 v-plow and $50 from the sale of each pink lift arm kit to the Maine Breast Cancer Coalition, where purchasers can choose to make the donation in memory of a person that has been affected by breast cancer.

Husqvarna Partners with Men Against Breast Cancer for 2017 Campaign In honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Husqvarna is partnering with Men Against Breast Cancer. Now in its fifth year, Husqvarna’s “Saws for a Cause” campaign will drive awareness and raise funds. Consumers in the U.S. and Canada can purchase limited-edition pink toy chain saws from local Husqvarna dealers during October. For every purchase Husqvarna and its partners will donate $3 (for up to $15,000), to Men Against Breast Cancer. Husqvarna is also holding the 2017 Husqvarna Breast Cancer Awareness Giveaway, where one randomly selected winner will receive a limited-edition pink 450 Rancher chain saw and limited-edition pink toy chain saw. That giveaway entry period runs from October 1 through November 15.

Weed Man Hits $100 Million Milestone Weed Man USA, the largest franchised lawn care company in North America, is proof positive that when a business wholeheartedly invests in people, an ongoing culture of success is created. With systems in place that are strategically designed to create multiple advancement opportunities for franchisees and their employees, Weed Man has experienced year over year growth. This week, the company announced that it has officially hit the $100 million revenue milestone in the United States. Since January, Weed Man USA has expanded into 21 new territories. The franchise has now established roots into 520-plus territories throughout the United States. Weed Man USA has grown almost 12 percent in 2017 and is projected to continue growing at the same rate in 2018.

Billy Goat To Give Away A 13 HP Debris Loader At GIE+EXPO GIE +EXPO trade show attendees are invited to enter a drawing for a Billy Goat 13 horsepower debris loader when completing a demo at the Billy Goat outdoor booth #6374-D. To register to win a DL1301H, attendees must complete a demo of any Billy Goat machine at booth #6374-D and submit a completed registration card at indoor booth #10168 or outdoor booth #6374-D. A combination of power and size, at 2,000 cfm of commercial suction, the DL1301H is designed for small to mid-size jobs and crews. A dual shredding 14.25-inch diameter armor plate impeller with Piranha blade that reduces debris up to 12:1 and maximizes trailer loading across multiple properties before dumping saves time and dump fees. The DL1301H is powered by a 388 cc Honda engine.

Asplundh Tree Experts Rocked with $95 Million Penalty The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia recently reported Asplundh Tree Experts Co., a tree trimming company has been handed a $95 million penalty, the largest ever imposed in a United States immigration case. The government said that the company hired employees who provided fake identification documents from 2010 to 2014. The company’s chairman and CEO Scott Asplundh said in a statement that it has taken steps to improve its hiring practices, including reviewing the identification of all employees. “We accept responsibility for the charges as outlined, and we apologize to our customers, associates and all other stakeholders for what has occurred,” he said.

PBI-Gordon Celebrates 70 Years The year was 1947 and the United States was in the post-World War II economic boom. Four industrious men in Kansas City pooled their considerable talents and shared values to create what would one day become a leading manufacturer of herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, and growth regulators for the professional turf and ornamental management industries. PBI-Gordon continues to thrive to this day. The company, which became 100 percent employee-owned in 2002, is pursuing an aggressive 10-year growth plan that includes investment in manufacturing and warehouse facilities and the reformulation of products to reduce costs and improve efficacy.

KYOCERA to Acquire Power Tool Business from RYOBI Kyocera Corporation has announced that it has concluded a basic agreement, as of September 29, to acquire the majority of shares, 80 percent, of a company to be established from the company split of Ryobi Limited’s power tool business. The acquisition is expected to be completed in January 2018. Kyocera has recently strengthened its power tool business in the U.S. and European markets through the acquisition of the Unimerco Group in Europe (now KYOCERA UNIMERCO A/S) in 2011 and the acquisition of SENCO Holdings, Inc. in August of this year (now KYOCERA SENCO Industrial Tools, Inc.) Ryobi has a strong market position in Japan and Asia encompassing a wide range of products with highly advanced technologies, Kyocera will be able to expand sales globally.

NCNLA’s One-Day Profit Planning Event Nov. 6 The North Carolina Nursery & Landscape Association (NCNLA) is offering a new local one-day intensive designed for landscape business owners and managers. Partnering with the Carolina Green Industry Network and two of the country’s leading experts on landscape business profitability, NCNLA’s inaugural One-Day Profit Planning will launch on November 6, 2017, at the Harris Conference Center in Charlotte. The one-day intensive will include interactive sessions on ­– Budgeting and Cost-Based Estimating (Marcus vandeVliet – MV Enterprises) and Defining and Sizing Your Team for Profit (Tim Smith – Ignite Business Strategies). 

DTN Acquires Wilkens Weather Technologies DTN, a provider of information and actionable insights in agriculture, weather, refined fuels and trading, recently acquired Wilkens Weather Technologies, a Houston-based weather company, from Rockwell Collins. Wilkens Weather Technologies provides weather forecasting services to customers in the offshore/maritime industry, in particular oil and gas.

New Reduced Risk Product Available for Production Ornamentals Environmental Science, a business unit of the Bayer Crop Science, is launching Altus insecticide for use in landscape ornamentals. Altus controls sucking pests before, during and after bloom, as well as providing compatibility with honey bees, bumble bees and many beneficials. Altus provides a new foundational chemistry for the ornamentals industry, which is available to growers for use with production ornamentals in greenhouses. The product offering flexible applications, broad-spectrum control, systemic and translaminar protecting of plant growth. It is also classified as a reduced risk product by the EPA.

NJPA Awards Contracts to 15 Green Industry Vendors The National Joint Powers Alliance (NJPA) recently awarded contracts to 15 vendors who offer grounds maintenance solutions. Through these contracts, government, education, and nonprofit entities can purchase mowers, chippers, diggers, landscape rakes, snow blowers and plow attachments, and much more. The vendors are: Ariens Company; Bandit Industries, Inc., John Deere–Mowers/Tractors; Exmark Manufacturing; Hustler Turf Equipment; Jacobsen; Kubota Tractor Corp.; Land Pride, Morbark, LLC; Power Distributors, LLC; Rhino AG, Inc.; Schulte Industries; The Toro Company; Ventrac by Venture Products, Inc. and Vermeer Corp. Purchasing off an NJPA contract streamlines the procurement process for public entities, saving them time and money. Effective as of August 18, 2017, the contracts are available to all NJPA members throughout the US and Canada.

FNGLA Landscape Show Set for Nov. 2-4 The Florida Nursery, Growers and Landscape Association plans to host The Landscape Show Redux Nov. 2-4, 2017, at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando. The original show had been canceled due to Hurricane Irma in September. The Landscape Show Redux will take place in the West building due to limited availability of convention center space. Also, the headquarters hotel moved from the Rosen Centre Hotel to the Rosen Shingle Creek on Universal Boulevard in Orlando. Complimentary bus service will be available directly to and from the Rosen Shingle Creek and the convention center. For more information on the rescheduled show, visit FNGLA’s website.

Arborjet Welcomes Bill Keogh to the Team Aroborjet, Woburn, Massachusetts, announced that Bill Keogh joined the company as production supervisor. Prior to his role at Arborjet, Keogh worked as Director of Fulfillment at Shawmut Communications Group, where he managed online ecommerce storefronts for customers and oversaw warehouse shipping and receiving operations. Also, Kevin Brewer joined the company as New England Territory Technical Manager responsible for identifying and securing new business in New England and maintaining existing accounts with distributors, municipalities, landscape companies, arborists and universities. Prior to his role at Arborjet, Brewer worked as general manager at Kaiser Tree Preservation Co.,

The Cleary Bros. Welcome New VP of Sales The Cleary Bros., Danville, California, recently hired Morgan Hall as its new vice president of sales. Hall is a Bay Area Native with 15 years sales experience, the last nine in commercial landscaping.

Valley Irrigation Announces Two Promotions Valley Irrigation, a division of Valmont Industries, Inc. in Valley, Nebraska, promoted Jodi Wacker to vice president of global human resources – Irrigation and Tubing, and Darren Siekman to vice president of global business development – Irrigation and Tubing. Wacker joined Valmont Industries in 2014 as the North American Irrigation human resources manager. Two years later, she became senior director of Global Human Resources. Siekman originally joined the team in 2014 to lead a joint development between Valmont and DuPont/ In 2016, Darren became director of business development for Global Irrigation and Tubing.

Anuvia Plant Nutrients Partners with Vereens Turf Anuvia Plant Nutrients announces an agreement with Vereens Turf to distribute Anuvia’s GreenTRX to Vereens golf, sod, lawn care and landscape customers. GreenTRX is an enhanced-efficiency, multi-nutrient, slow-release specialty fertilizer made to deliver fast deep greening of turf and lawns while also protecting the environment. Vereens Turf is a regional fertilizer formulator and blender serving Southeast golf, sod, lawn and landscape customers for over 20 years.

Read last week’s industry news roundup: Yale Replacing Grounds Gear With Electric Alternatives

The post Manufacturers Go Pink to Support Breast Cancer Awareness Month: This Week’s Industry News appeared first on Turf.

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