International-Harvestor / McCormick B275 Diesel

It is a B275 IH.... or at least I think it is an IH, it has a metal International emblem on the right side, but the same place on the other side is a metal McCormick emblem. The IH symbol is on the nose too.

I haven"t picked it up yet, that will be tomorrow or Monday depending on his availability.

It is rusty but not rotted anywhere except to small spots from the fender braces on the rear fenders. It has two new front tires, one new rear tire, and the other has great tread but is severely sun cracked. It has an IH brand front end loader with a goofy trip-bucket (for now). Two year old battery... everything works except for the guages.

It also came with tire chains and a six-foot McKee snowblower. Both the tractor and blower need paint in the worst way (sun burnt).

I paid a whopping $3000 Canadian for it (about $2400 US).

What do you guys think?

All I know about these machines is that they are built in Great Britain... and that came from this site. I also read that these can be hard starters but this one, which was stone cold and had sat for a month, cranked over after 10-15secs of glow plugs, and fired immediately. Gave a nice puff of smoke for about 30 secs but cleared up immediately and never smoked again.

Does anyone know the horsepower rating, how to decode the serial number (for year etc), and perhaps how to diagnose the guage problem (haven"t even looked yet)?

What do you think of these machines? How was my price? The local dealership told him they would try to get $5k for him on consignment, but he didn"t want to wait as he needs it gone... he took my offer of $3k.

Any input?

I was basically looking for an older working tractor, this one suits perfectly.

Is there anything I should be looking for on it, ie: known weak points etc.??

I read last night somewhere that they had swappable Cat-1 and Cat-2 linkages... I'm wondering how that works. I DID notice when looking at it that it had an extra set of pivot pins right above the ones the links are currently on, is it as simple as swapping them end-for-end onto those pins or something? If not, what are those pins for?

My first complaint is the way the hydraulics are set up to share a lever between the loader and the 3 point hitch--thats gotta go! Not sure, gotta ask the guy what I am doing wrong, but I can't make the hitch raise unless I run the loader right up to the top first. There's going to be some fab work getting a real bucket on there, plus dual acting cylinders...

Clutch seems to be out of adjustment or something... extremely stiff to push, VERY difficult to engage the PTO (lots of grinding first, even with the clutch on the boards), also seems almost like a delayed reaction between letting the clutch out and the tractor actually moving... might be something needing lube?

That is some heavy steering! Its my first loader tractor, and while I am no stranger to manual steering, this one is hard to turn! Can power steering be retrofitted to these? I've heard it was an option.

The tractor does seem a little hard to start--I shouldn't need the block heater in this weather!! I can hold the glow plugs for, like, 20 seconds or so like he showed me and it goes ok, but even seems to need glow plugs on a semi-warm start (ie: sitting for half an hour)... does this seem normal?

I didn't have much time to fool with it, basically drove it off the trailer and into the yard, and popped the tire chains off before I had to go out.