While Oliver was well-known as an exporter, it really came to life in 1953 under the guidance of Les Dyke. Many of Oliver’s products were built exclusively for export and not even offered in the US.

The Oliver rubber-tired payloaders were items brought into the product line for export. To this day many Oliver collectors don’t even know about these machines.

In 1956 Oliver’s Export Division was looking for a rubber-tired heavy-duty loader to compliment their already successful crawler line. Instead of the costly job of designing and tooling up for such a machine, Oliver turned to the Thew Shovel Company of Lorain, Ohio.

Thew had their own payloader line known as the Thew Moto-Loader. Oliver picked the ML-153 loader, which they would market as the Oliver OL 175. The gas version of this machine was powered by a Hercules GO-339 engine. The diesel version was powered by a Hercules DRXB engine. The OL 175 had a 1 3/4 yard bucket and full reversing torqmatic transmission. Early literature shows it’s had a 1 1/2 yard bucket but that was changed on later literature. The OL-175 is actually pictured in a 1956 issue of Oliver Export news however, no number designation had been assigned yet at that time.

Competition was stiff in the payloader business and Oliver was up against the Hough HH, Michigan 125-A, Allis Chalmers TL-20 D and the Yale 154 Trojan. Most of these advertised a 2-yard bucket. It didn’t take long for Oliver to realize they needed to keep up so the OL 175 was upgraded to the OL 200 later in 1958. The OL 200 was basically the Thew ML-157.

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