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OLD IRON
Inter an early Kiwi icon Story & Photos: Gavin Abbot
N THE FIRST HALF OF LAST CENTURY, TRUCKS MADE BY NORTH America’s International Harvester Company played a big part in New Zealand’s early trucking history – from the earliest days of horseless wagons. It helped, of course, that IH was also a leading agricultural machinery manufacturer – and thus had agents spread right across NZ. Good aftersales backup for the trucks was a major contributor to International’s Kiwi success. The company constantly improved the technology and reliability of its models – and NZ saw most of the Inter models that were manufactured in the make’s first 40 years. One model in particular set the standard in NZ – and became the country’s best-selling 6x4: The D246F – part of the D Series that International began building in 1937. It was the forerunner to other popular models, the K/KB and L/R190, that followed International’s pause in commercial truck production during World War 2, while it focused all of its manufacturing on the American war effort. The International Harvester Company was created in 1902, but its beginnings actually extended back seven decades before that. The global company was created by the merger of the Chicagobased McCormick Harvesting Machine Company and the Deering Harvester Company, plus three smaller American farming equipment manufacturers. Its original roots lay with inventor Cyrus Hall McCormick’s 1831 unveiling of a horse-drawn reaper – which became the major
Top: Waipawa, Hawke’s Bay transport operator Sep Stephenson with one of his D35 Internationals
Above: A 1910 International Harvester Auto Buggy, pictured at a truck show in Hora Hora, NZ Truck & Driver | 71
