Potato Planter ID Help

[nh8260]

So i found this 2 row potato planter for sale and i am trying to find out the make and model of it, I can barely read a decal on the hopper, looks like it has a er on the end of the brand but its very hard to read, didn't find a tag on it anywhere. It has the spikes on a wheel that moves the pieces to the back before dropping them. Below are the pictures i got.

 

[Timmycornpicker]

That looks similar to a McConnell, even to the orangey color and decal placement. But I've never seen a McConnell with spoke wheels, only demountable rims. I don't know if McConnell started from scratch with potato planters, or like with the Ontario grain drills, acquired an existing design and made changes to it over the years.

 

[oliverkid]

Its an Iron Age. Should be a tag on the main frame somewhere if you get it out of the weeds. I think the Yellow paint makes it pre Oliver buyout.

 

[Handyman]

Oliver/Superior

 

[oliverkid]

Superior had nothing to do with the Oliver potato planters. The
drill line came from superior. The potato line came from Iron Age.

 

[J.Wondergem]

Yup. Iron Age. The neighbor's had one that looks the same.

 

[Timmycornpicker]

So that leaves me wondering. White did not buy the Farquhar plant when they bought Oliver. McConnell came on the scene right around then. So could McConnell have acquired the Iron Age potato line and continued it? If you look at a McConnell 500, very close in appearance except for the spoke wheels.

 

[nh8260]

Do these work good? I've seen videos of the spike pickup's before but never used one, i usually plant several different varieties of potatoes so some of the varieties may only be 100 or so pounds of seed, just wondering when they get down to a few pieces left does someone have to move them around or will it pickup whatever is left in there??

 

[oliverkid]

Lockwood bought the line.

 

[J. Schwiebert]

Did they buy the Iron age piston pumps and sprayer line as well?

 

[JohnRowehl]

(quoted from post at 23:20:55 09/28/23) That looks similar to a McConnell, even to the orangey color and decal placement. But I've never seen a McConnell with spoke wheels, only demountable rims. I don't know if McConnell started from scratch with potato planters, or like with the Ontario grain drills, acquired an existing design and made changes to it over the years.

Story my father told me was when Lockwood bought the potato planter from Oliver, all the design engineers, with the blueprints in their heads, went to work for McConnell. I don t know how patent issues, if any, were dealt with.

Our Oliver Iron Age Planter was yellow but for all I know it could have been repainted between 1953 and the beginning of what I remember from childhood and on, which was somewhere around 1959-60.

 

[oliverkid]

No idea. The only reason I found out Lockwood ended up with the planters was because I stumbled upon and bought an Oliver Iron Age 260 corn planter which is very heavily based on a 2 row potato planter. It came with the original manuals and in the parts book there was some correspondence on Lockwood letterhead from 1962 where the original owner of the planter was contacting them about some repair parts. After finding that I did a little searching and found that up until the late 90s at least, Lockwood kept building potato planters that were virtually identical to the Iron Age planters.

 

[rrlund]

I had an Oliver Iron Age sprayer with a big Oliver Iron Age decal on each side of the tank and it was yellow.

 

[Timmycornpicker]

Hmmmm. I just read an Heritage Iron article I found while doing a google search that said the McConnell 500 planter was replaced in 1965 (after what appears
to be 4 years of production) by the 555 with '20 new improvements'. That might have meant '20 things we had to change to get Lockwood's lawyers off our
backs'.