Collecting With The Allis Guys
By Richard Keesy/Nick Zurlick

After the merger of Deutz and Allis-Chalmers, Deutz discontinued the Allis lineup of tractors at the end of 1985. Although Deutz wasn’t making them anymore they did advertise the remaining stock of Allis Chalmers 8000 series tractors as there big horsepower tractors. Deutz realized that they needed there own line of big horsepower tractors so in 1988 an engineering group headquartered at the Independence, Missouri, plant developed the 9100 series tractors. 

 Deutz engines were combined with White power train, chassis, and cabs. The new 9150 (150hp), 9170 (170hp), 9190 (193hp) tractors where manufactured by White, at the Coldwater OH plant. Production began in 1989. Due to poor sales Deutz conducted a survey of farmers to see what they wanted from Deutz-Allis. Many customers being die hard Allis-Chalmers fans wanted there Orange back over the Spring Green. In the summer 1990 Deutz-Allis Landhandler Magazine, Deutz-Allis introduced that the 9100 series of tractors were going to be painted the same shade of orange that was introduced on the Allis-Chalmers 7000 series of tractors that were produced in the 70’s.  This proved to be a good move and brought back some of the straying Allis fans.

In 1991 the smaller model 9130 was introduced. Very similar to the 9150 the 9130 was a detuned version for the 130hp market. Because of its late entry into the lineup it was only produced in the orange colors. The 9100 series was replaced by the new Agco-Allis 9600 series in 1993. The 9100 series was the last tractor to bear the Deutz-Allis name. 

As far as we know there are only 4 brochures on the 9100 series. We think there might be some other ones on the green versions but we are not sure. Please let us know if there are more. 

The toys were purchased from Jeremy Gustafson. The first versions of the 9100 toys were featured in the March Toy Tractor Times at St. Louis. They were made from plastic resin, but when Jeremy had them casted in zinc the quality went way up and they looked better. After seeing the improvement in a picture from John Schomburg ,we recently purchased four of them from him. They were nice when we got them, but we wanted to detail them up. We filed the castings and defined the hoods more, moved the stacks, and repainted them. On the 2-wheel drive models we replaced the front axels. On models with singles we put rear wheels off Ertl's AGCO Allis 9600 series tractors. The rims were identical to the real ones. For the green models the centers of the rims were painted black, We also painted the interiors gray like the real ones. Finally we decaled them up and made one of each model.

We hope you have enjoyed our first article, our plan is to contribute to The Toy Tractor Times by sharing stories using our AGCO literature collection and custom 1/64 toys. It is our hope it will help promote AGCO's interesting history and equipment. Before we sign off for January we would like to share a few pictures of the 9100 Deutz-Allis tractors on our model farm.