Where is bolens made

Thanks for the A2A. No, most John Deere tractors are powered by their own engines. The small tractors could be made overseas and may have different engines, it depends upon the model.

Some of their lawn and turf products like lawnmowers will have engines from Briggs or Kawasaki. Who makes Troy Bilt engines? Troy-Bilt is owned by MTD. MTD has it's own Chinese made engines on some of it's equipment. Maybe they have already started. Where are Craftsman mowers made? Craftsman Lawn Mowers are mainly produced in China, although some are manufactured in Taiwan.

Sears has never made Craftsman products themselves, rather than relying on other manufacturers to manufacture them to Sears' designs and specifications and then use the name of the Craftsman brand. Is Troy Bilt a good brand?

This is why Troy-Bilt is a top choice among many homeowners as this company has helped establish the value of products made in the USA. Lowes doesnt carry the higher end ones, but the higher ends cost a LOT. Shawnda Maclean Professional. Are Troy Bilt and Craftsman the same?

There is nothing common about them. On the other hand, look at troybilt and Craftsman , they are almost the same. Craftsman and Troybilt string trimmers are the same for sure. Lasse Graff Explainer.

MTD makes all of the store brands i. MTD makes the low end non-commercial John Deere tractors. John Deere makes all John Deere. MTD makes White. Valeska Kerste Explainer. Is Toro and Exmark the same company? Well-Known Member. Well, Exmark is made by Toro , but exmarks are mostly commercial models.

Antonette Colomar Explainer. Who builds Troybilt? MTD Products. Expert apparatuses were, to begin with, sold in They were not made by Burns, but by different other companies beneath contract.

These instruments were sold in Burns, sister retailer Kmart, and numerous other retailers. I started "Landscape and Lawns Care" to provide clients with lawn care with better service, better products and, most importantly, better ethics. My promise to every customer is to give the greenest grass possible while controlling weeds, insects, and diseases! The most important thing is that I strive to always do the right thing for you, your lawn and your wallet! The first and second tractors and the mowers were scrapped.

They would not sell me the drawings, but I did manage to get a complete set of blueprints. It just goes to show the lack of foresight of corporate men when they are so far from the real world. Several years after buying the Bolens prototype, I decided that I would redesign and build the tractor the way I thought it should have been built. The first thing I did was to increase the tire size. I changed the rear from an This did not leave much room to get on the tractor, so I lengthened the wheelbase.

This tractor had the Vickers hydrostatic transmission, and I decided that it should have a gear transmission. The tractor had a Bolens GK 2 speed on the rear axle housing, so all I needed was a 3 speed to make it a 6-speed transmission.

I installed a Borg Warner 3 speed with reverse transmission. I had all the clutch parts from the Bolens GK tractor and everything fit together. The water-cooled engine required a radiator, and I bought an IH radiator.

However, that did not fit under the stylized angled hood. I made new hood side panels and rebuilt the fiberglass grille. I removed the hydraulic diverter valve and replaced it with a 2-spool valve.

In the FMC Corporate people canceled my big tractor project and I did not make any southern test trips. I was then given the project to design the new Bolens QT16 garden tractor to replace the current tube frame tractor, which was the main product for Bolens in the s. During , I designed the new garden tractor, including all the areas of the QT16 tractor.

The first version was 6 HP, and it was boosted to 16HP. The original was a 3 speed manual transmission, and now it was 6 speeds and a hydrostatic transmission. I was given the following specifications for the new Bolens QT16 tractor: 16 HP engine, hydrostatic transmission, 48 inch mower, 42 in snowblower, 33 inch rotary tiller.

The mower was to be a completely new design with a deeper deck. The snowblower and the tiller were current units. The inch mower required a longer wheelbase, and the deeper mower deck required a higher or different frame. The engine was mounted with the output shaft facing the front because the most power was for the mower and snowblower.

So I started with a clean sheet of paper on the drawing board. The transmission and all the gears were machined at the Port Washington, WI factory. This tractor was also the first garden tractor to use universal joint driveshafts to power all the attachments.

One of the biggest problems was the Brooks Stevens styling of the sheet metal. The styling was a small version of the large red tractor. We built one prototype with that styling and the tractor looked fat nobody liked the styling and Brooks was told to come up with a narrower style.

The hood was very narrow and did not allow a carburetor on the engine. Brooks told me to have Kohler move the carburetor. Also, the new styling would have required us to tool an air cleaner. So, I ignored parts of his styling and was able to build a prototype. The engineering of the prototype QT16 tractor was different from any of the tractors on the market at that time. The engine forced the cooling air out the front of the tractor, or the engine was mounted backwards from the current Bolens tractors.

The hydrostatic transmission and rear axle that I designed were completely new. The operator seating was closer to an automobile, whereas the current model seating was like a bus.

That engine was a real shaker, so I changed to a TJD engine which had a better balance. After testing in FL, another engineer drove the truck and tractor back to Port Washington and I started the revisions for the 2 prototype.

The styling of the tractor grille was such that it could not be made from steel and we designed it in fiberglass. We continued working on the details until the FMC Corp. They would not sell me the drawings but I did manage to get a complete set of blueprints. The water-cooled engine required a radiator, and I bought a IH radiator.

Bolens had changed our winter test site to Houma. Houma is located about 60 miles southwest of New Orleans and is in the heart of the Cajun country.

We worked out of a Bolens and Ford tractor dealership. The dealership was owned by Marvin Marmon, a very rich Cajun. He complained to me that the gas well next to his house kept him awake at night. We hired one of his men to be our straw boss on the tractor drivers. All the drivers were African American. The straw boss was Bossco. One time I was looking for a jack to lift a garden tractor to change a tire.

Bossco wanted to know why I wanted a jack, and he told one of the drivers to lift up the tractor, so I could change the tire. And the driver simply picked up the tractor and I changed the tire. Bossco told him that there were 2 problems floating in that bayou that morning. No more questions were asked by the whiz kid from the big city. I was usually in Houma 2 weeks and then home 2 weeks and then back in Houma for another 2 weeks.

In , I made 3 trips to Houma and had the distributor advisory meeting in New Orleans. The parts man that helped us was Bobby. On the weekend, Bobby would take me fishing in the bayous around Houma. Houma was located on the intercostal canal that ran from the Mississippi to the coast.

The main industry in Houma was sugar cane, oil and gas wells and shrimp fishing in the gulf. The gulf coast oil well platforms were supplied from Houma through the inter-coastal canal.

The only thing south of Houma was swamp. We would go fishing in these bayous. The house was along a dirt road, but it was built on stilts over the bayou. Houma was not a very big city, and some nights we would all go to New Orleans for dinner and entertainment. We always went to the French Quarter. Sometimes we would not get back to Houma until the wee hours of the morning. One time our division manager decided to hold a distributor advisory meeting at the test site in Houma to view the 18 hp Bolens tractor that I had designed.

And of course, the meetings would be held at a hotel in the French Quarter. That area is so noisy that it is impossible to sleep. Our division manager had a problem, and it was alcohol. I had to escort him to his room several times. That was the big show for the lawn and garden industry. We went to that Hardware show a couple of years and then the Hardware show moved to Cincinnati and then to Chicago.

In the spring of I drove the stake truck and trailer to Houma, LA. The truck and trailer was full of garden tractors and mowers to be tested in Houma. I made 3 trips to Houma that spring. Sometimes I was only home a week and then back to Houma, LA. The trips were always on 2 lane roads because the interstate highways were not in existence at that time.

As I was driving through southern Illinois, the truck emitted a load bang and lots of steam. I stopped in the middle of nowhere and looked at the truck. The fan had lost a blade and caused the water pump to fail and screw itself into the radiator. This happened on a Friday afternoon. Fortunately, a man stopped and looked at my predicament. He drove me to the next town which was small and the only gas station in town and said that these people could fix my truck.

The gas station had 2 pumps and a dirt driveway. As I peered into the station I saw that the back room was the second story of the garage, and it was full of cars being repaired. The station owner took me back to my truck and wrote down all the parts that were needed to fix the truck. Then back to his station and he had a young man take a truck out to my truck, and we towed the stake truck into his station and parked it under a tree. By that time the station owner had returned from somewhere with all the parts to fix my truck.

The young man that towed me to town started fixing the radiator. In November we also had a test program in McAllen, Texas to test rotary tillers in the hard adobe soil. QT stood for Quiet Twin.

I was home with the kids one night. The other truck was a large van with a low floor height to make it easier to load the equipment in the truck. To have the low floor height, special tires were used on the rear. As I was driving in Arkansas, one of those special tires lost the tread. I pulled into Memphis and spent the weekend there waiting for a tire store to open. After much talking I could buy a regular tire, and I was on the road again.

In the fall off , the meetings were held every week in Chicago. I wrote the sections on the steering and hydrostatic control systems. I was given the responsibility of all the Bolens tractors in current production at that time. My Bolens QT16 garden tractor project was totally changed to use a new Onan engine and the marketing people wanted the tractor to meet the new Chicago noise ordinance of 72 DBA at 70 feet distance.

Chicago passed a new lower noise ordinance. Our marketing department decided that we should meet that new noise limits. I was assigned Mark, a new engineer, to help design the Onan engine mounting and the lower noise limit. I had to go to several seminars to learn how to reduce the noise of the tractor.

That meant the complete redesign of the frame, engine compartment and sheet metal styling. I had the prototypes ready for the testing in Houma in the spring of I made 2 trips to Houma, LA that spring. That was Dick Chalmers, and he turned out to be the best boss I ever had.

He had a lot of forward-thinking and challenged us to design the most advanced tractors on the market. Early in , we sold W Larrabee in Port Washington. I took my wife and three boys and moved to the country. I borrowed a snowmobile from Bolens and trailered it to the farm to look at the land and the woods because the snow was too deep to walk the land. The farm would be our home for the next 34 years, and we raised 5 kids there.

Tim was only a few months old. The new test site was a acre orange grove that was located 2 miles off the main road in the bush. The grove was managed by a rather colorful character. We hired the tractors drivers through the local Bolens dealer in Lake Worth the first year. I made 2 trips to Lake Worth that spring. The entire orange grove was sand, and large drainage canals separated the blocks of orange trees.

The roads in the grove were on the edge of the canals. Sometimes hippies would ride their dirt bikes in the grove and make deep tracks.

One time, the grove manager stopped 2 hippies on their off-road bike. Since it was their second warning, the grove manager took his 38 pistol out from under the seat and shot a hole in the engine of the bike.

The hippies had to push the bike over 2 miles on sand roads to get back to civilization. I made 2 trips to that test site in The tractor drivers that we received from the temp agencies were not too smart. One guy came out to the site wearing sandals. We told him that there were rattlesnakes in the grass around the trees, and he must wear boots. He got bit by a rattle snake, and we had to take him to a doctor to get a shot of anti-venom.

He never came back. Another time, 2 men in suits came to our test site and wanted to know where one of the drivers was in the grove. They then showed us FBI badges. The tractor was designed by another engineer with an Eaton model 12 hydrostatic rear axle. The hydrostatic was a radial piston pump and a gear motor.

Eaton made the complete rear axle. Another engineer Noel had redesigned the to fit the Kohler 2 cylinder opposed 18HP which was the tractor. The model 12 hydro was tired and the cost was getting high. It was decided that we should make our own rear axle. I was given the task of designing a new rear axle that would fit the new garden tractor and the large frame tractor. I started with a clean sheet of paper on my drawing board. I designed the rear axle to use the Eaton model10 hydro and the Sundstrand hydro.

The Eaton model 10 was a radial ball piston hydro. The Sundstrand was an axial piston hydro. I used the Eaton on the new middle tractor and the Sundstrand on the large frame tractor. I had built several prototypes of each axle and we were progressing fine on the projects. I tried the model 10 in the large frame tractor but it did not have the torque capacity. So I designed a 2 speed axle utilizing a planetary gear set on the top shaft and the model 10 hydro worked fine.

I was working on the transmissions and fitting the tramsaxles into the two tractors. The large frame tractor with the new transaxles was the model tractor. In late , I filed for a patent on a hood pivot for detachably connecting a tractor hood to a tractor frame I had designed. I would eventually be awarded 10 different patents for products I invented or worked on while at Bolens and Weasler Engineering.

The Abstract read: A hood pivot bracket secured to the front end of the frame of a garden and lawn tractor is used to allow ready attachment and detachment of the tractor hood to or from the tractor frame. The lower front end of the hood is pivotally retained by the bracket and can be swung forward about the bracket to an angular position wherein the hood can be pulled forward to detach the hood from the bracket and frame.

W Hwy A, Waubeka, Wisconsin: acre farm we owned starting in