Below is the story of my 2 "antique" John Deere Chain Saws. Background: My Dad worked for Deere for 42 years before he retired, from the mail room, to Engineering Stress Analysis, and ending as the worldwide manager of Product Safety. From '61 to '69, he was also the Mayor of Moline, IL He had Moline Street Dept. deliver some truckloads of elm to our house to save the City some dump fees. For those that don't recognize the manufacturer Desa he mentioned, back then, they made Remington chain saws. You will notice in the pictures, that the 19" Deere prototype saw is a repainted DESA Remington saw by the Remington orange paint showing through the scratched and worn green John Deere paint, and the serial number ending in zeros. The 19" saw is on display in my kitchen, the 23"er is out in the barn. Both still ran back in 2004, when we used them to cut up and hand split a fallen 30" coast live oak back in California for his 80th birthday. I haven't tried starting them since I moved to IL. JOHN DEERE CHAIN SAWS by James F. Arndt May 25, 2010 John Deere founded Deere & Company in 1838 for the manufacturing of plows. Eventually the company expanded into other agricultural equipment. In order to gain a broad market for its product, Deere developed a broad dealer network. After some 125 years of primarily agriculture machinery, Deere expanded its product line into industrial equipment and consumer products. And new dealerships were established for these products. The dealers of all three lines of John Deere equipment needed peripheral equipment to better serve the needs of their customers. During the 1960s, a new entity was established within the Company and referred to as “OMP” (standing for Outside Manufactured Products). It was determined that a line of chain saws would fit in nicely with all three types of dealerships. After contacting several chain saw manufacturers, the company selected Desa Industries to develop chain saws built under the John Deere name with the “LEAPING DEER” logo. The first pre-production model was delivered about 1967. Painted JD green with yellow trim, its John Deere name and Leaping Deer were cut from photographic negatives, and hand pasted on the saw. That saw, a 19 inch model was pictured in instruction manuals and advertising displays. That is a brief history of the 19-inch model chain saw. Such preproduction models are not sold to customers but are made available for evaluation by employees and Deere associates. I bought this chain saw and used it for over ten years cutting up vast amounts of elm trees. During the late 1950’s and 1960’s, the Dutch-Elm Disease decimated some 80,000 elm trees in Moline, Illinois (The home of John Deere). Moline had been know for its majestic elms with one specimen used to promulgate the species throughout the country. One winter, I burned an estimated twelve cords of elm wood in our two stone masonry fireplaces. Toward the end of the agreement with Desa Industries, among other sizes, a 23-inch model had been produced. One of these last models was displayed on the display floor of the Deere World Wide Headquarters in Moline. Since it was out of production, I bought it and used it for the next ten years along with the 19-inch model. By this time during the late 1970’s the elms were all but gone but a new scourge (anthracnose) attacked the oak trees. The oak trees took longer to die than the elms. Our house adjoined a park having a large number of oaks. The park department would fell the trees and I sawed them up and switched to burning oak. When we moved to California, I left behind several cords of seasoned oak firewood. ___
Still see them at auctions here in Pa. Homelite, Echo, Efco and probably others made saws with JD badging. The Color of Money lol
I've posted these here somewhere before. The 1976 new in box Remington I scored about and hour away from the house.
For some reason i like the EFCO saws in JD green. The 65cc model is said to be a desireable saw. Meebe others too, ive never ran an EFCO saw.
