VALMET

The history of VALMET

Valmet began as a state arms factory, and its first production tractor has a gun barrel in it.

The Finnish state metal works were rebuilt after the Second World War out of the country's weapons industry, with the job of making civilian goods for reconstruction. One of them, the state cannon factory, started designing a tractor at the end of the 1940s. The engine came from drawings by an English engineer named Pobjoy, who died in an aircraft accident shortly afterwards; some of his drawings were lost with him. A first prototype was finished in 1949 and was not a success — its single-cylinder 12 hp engine would not reliably start.

The company took competitors' tractors apart in detail and began again. In 1951 Valtion Metallitehtaat became the Valmet Corporation and the tractor project moved to Tourula, taking the parts of ten prototypes with it. Prototype number nine survives at the Suolahti works. The section of its frame between the clutch and the gearbox is a piece of cannon barrel.

Three of the first ten were simply handed to neighbouring farmers. Word spread, 75 tractors were built in 1952, and the machine was shown publicly at that summer's agricultural fairs; 250 orders followed. The Valmet 15, also called the Model A, arrived in 1953 — a four-cylinder four-stroke running on kerosene and started on petrol, about 15 hp from 1.5 litres.

1954 was the year it became a real manufacturer: the 2,000th tractor left the works in September. The 3,000th followed in spring 1955, the year the Valmet 20 appeared and the first exports went to Turkey. The 33 D of 1957 had six forward gears against the five most competitors offered, and put the fuel tank inside the body between clutch and gearbox — a Valmet characteristic from then on.

Brazil mattered more than any of it. Exports there were growing when the Brazilian government invited twenty manufacturers to tender for domestic production, on condition that 95% of a tractor's value was Brazilian within four years. Valmet came second, built at Mogi das Cruzes east of São Paulo, and the first five machines left that works in 1960 as the 360 D — the 359 D in all but the engine, which came from MWM in Brazil.

The ending is a chain of mergers. Valmet and Volvo BM pooled their tractor work as Scantrac in 1979. A planned joint range with Steyr-Daimler-Puch in 1986 collapsed when Deutsche Bank, which owned both Steyr and Deutz, intervened — though the Mezzo and Mega ranges of 1991 came out of the work. In 1994 the tractor factory was merged into Sisu, Sisu into Partek in 1997, and Sisu Tractors was renamed Valtra.

Written from Traktorenlexikon: Valmet, Wikibooks, CC BY-SA 4.0 · retrieved 2026-09-14. Our words, not the source's.