Combines Birotor re visited patents

[dakota]

The birotor was invented by a farmer. Mark Underwood first thought of this in probably 1978. He needed a combine to try his idea. A 1480 IH came closest. After he found out how well it worked he wanted to build a new combine from scratch and incorporate all the other ideas, he had, too. To get a big company to produce and market such a thing seems very complicate. There is too much politics involved these days. I guess part of it is, that none of the big bosses wants to admit that a "dumb" farmer was able to invent and built a machine far superior to their high dollar engineering department contraptions. I am saying this from experience and being an engineer myself.

 

[mid_west]

It seemed like companies had more respect for other patents during the time frame that the birotor was being developed. Do you think that part of the reason Cat had NH running the birotor was that they were already sharing patents on rotor machinesIJ I was always wondered why IH didn't pursue the concept more, or even now....it looked like it would have fit in better in the machines they had on line and the factory they were using.

 

[dakota]

I didn't think CAT had any patents. About IH and CASE, I feel that they never had much money too gamble with. IH had to be weak enough to be bought by CASE. CASE had the money from Tenneco at the time. Then they got bought by NH_Fiat. I think that they never had enough capital to really do a big step. From the IH 1400 to the 2300 now, everything they have changed was done little by little. The only one who could have done it was CAT. But at the time they were already flirting with Claas to get their Challengers sold in Europe. Then a couple of years ago they apparently learned that dealing with farmers is a whole different ball game than constuction companies and decided to pull the plug again.